Cantrian Sun

General out-of-character discussion among players of Cantr II.

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Vanya
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Cantrian Sun

Postby Vanya » Sat Mar 04, 2017 4:14 pm

So...

I have been asking myself lately: what kind of sun is the cantrian sun?

Well, if we stick to the real world logic (cantr-logic is not always logical...) and the human observations to this point about what happens out there in the Big Void, a planet orbiting its sun every 20 days must be REALLY close to it. I mean... REALLY. Like REALLY-DAMN close.
So if a planet is that close to its sun and it stils has an atmosphere, and it supports life, the star in question must be pretty dim, outputing low luminical radiation and heat, and commonly being a red dwarf. That means: a RED SUN.

This is fun actually, because if the cantrian world actually orbits a red sun, then all the days are tinted in red, and the animals and plants in this world must look a lot different in color than those we actually have in Earth. Not just because all is showered in red light, but because to adapt to this low radiation world their colors must be different. Specially plants´s colors.
... Not to mention people... Colored people specially must have it like a trip in the Artic. Even white or pale people must have a hard drink with it, being the only chance of the opossite having a warm planet because some kind of natural greenhouse effect.

However, even with greenhouse effect, the sun should be red :p.

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS? Lets discuss it!!
Millhouse
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Re: Cantrian Sun

Postby Millhouse » Sat Mar 04, 2017 5:38 pm

It's hard to apply real world physics to the world of Cantr because it is so physically different. If you were to try, the Cantr world might be more donut shaped. Even that fails to really explain the shape of the world. I think of it more like Pac-Man physics, with some mysterious and unexplained force that allows the world to wrap upon itself at the edges. Maybe by way of wormholes or a dimensional curtain surrounding it. Another theory I had is that Cantr is a cube, and people, places, objects and everything on the surface are projected on to each face of the cube by some unknown force.

Since there's no built in night/day mechanics in the game if Cantr, the sun is always out. So either the Cantrian sun is static or the world doesn't rotate like our own, or the unknown properties of the Cantrian world create some situation where the sun always faces the world. Another thought is that the Cantrian Sun is something entirely different than what we humans call the sun. Instead of a giant ball of burning gasses, the Cantrian Sun is some kind of omnipresent... thing that Cantrians have come to call the Sun.

For me, part of the fun of playing has been thinking about how the world would look with earth physics. I've never seen any real attempt by players to try to explain the world in-game. It would be interesting if there were some kind of Copernicus-esque character in-game presenting new ideas about the physical world.
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Vanya
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Re: Cantrian Sun

Postby Vanya » Sat Mar 04, 2017 6:32 pm

Hummm... Well... I guess I can take that and try to explain it myself. Lets see.

About the day and night, Cantr actually has days. Since there are days and also hours, I can asume that "the first ones" (lets call them some way...) distinguished some kind of cycles, and that every season lasts 5 cycles. So if people can distinguish something like a cycle, then it must be some difference in the surroundings that makrs the end of a cycle (or day) and the beginning of another. Consequently, they divided the day in 8, and blah blah blah...

So having days, and then having day and night (or at least they just "created" days that define the time between a season and another)... Maybe the day has rotation, or maybe not.
If not, then it has no sense to role like its night at some times (or who knows? maybe the night is random).
If there is rotation,... Well, pretty much normal.

Now... The world´s shape.
If there is rotation, we have a world that can be pretty much cubic shaped, or donut-like shaped, or rice´s grain-like shaped. Or some weird shape like that.
THERE IS also another theory: the world is inverted. Like Pryan, in the Death Gate Cycle novel. The world is an inverted hollow globe, with the sun in the center and an inverted gravity that pushes everything out of the world.
Being that way, people would be living actually in the inner side of the hollow world, in a perpetual day, having cycles only because the sun becomes dimmer and brighter at regular times. There, the sun is not a real sun, but a kind of artificial mass of unknown substance that provides heat and light.
Pretty much, then the world is esferic, but in an inverted way of it. And it has days and nights, and the map would have sense, and there is not such kind as "rotation", and the seasons would have a reason in the sun providing more or less heat in a planned cycle that lasts 20 days from one end to the other.
Millhouse
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Re: Cantrian Sun

Postby Millhouse » Sat Mar 04, 2017 8:41 pm

What I meant by there being no day/night mechanic is that there is never any moment when the sun is not visible. In some locations (deserts mostly) you can look at the locations page at any given time and it will be "very sunny".

But yes there is a measure of time called a "day" in Cantr. I would assume this means something entirely different on Cantr than it does on Earth. Time still exists whether or not you have a consistent way of measuring it (like the time it takes Earth to rotate once on its axis or the time Earth takes to make one rotation around our sun). There's are no clocks in Cantr and no time when the sun doesn't shine, yet Cantrians are really good at telling time. Maybe they have some innate ability, some extra sensory apparatus to tell time. Maybe they're very attuned to nature or they just have highly sophisticated biological clocks.

I've wondered too if it made sense for Cantr to be basically a very large Dyson Sphere, but the problem with any kind of spherical shape (or any three dimensional shape) is that the map has definite edges. It's a square. No matter how you try to turn it into a three dimensional shape, the map breaks.

If you allow for some suspension of disbelief on a few aspects, things start to make a bit more sense. It's much easier to think of the world as a sphere even though the map is square. That's probably how Jos and the game designers intended it. I can't imagine how hard it would be to code an actual spherical map. But it's still fun to try to unravel Cantr physics.
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Vanya
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Re: Cantrian Sun

Postby Vanya » Sat Mar 04, 2017 9:13 pm

Oh, but we actually use square maps in schools and pretty much in most of our non-exact moments of life. Even if the shape of the map doesn´t fit with a spherical world, or if the continents and their shapes are distorted. I can live with that, going from a sphere to a square.
What does not fit at all is going from a cube to a square. Its just too much terrain not being drawn. Like 1/3 or so of the world.

So Ok. Im more convinced now that the sun shines all the time, and more inclined to believe that the world is like a Dyson sphere. Days may be because the sun becomes dimmer at some point, or they are just artificial creations, like hours, to make a bunch of cycles between one season and other.
Anyway, the season change still exists, and that may be because the sun emits more or less radiation in a cyclic and regular way.

So if the previous would be right (sun all the time and everywhere at the same moment, seasons but no night or day clearly defined, continuous map,.. so inner world then??...) then then the sun can be of any color and there will be no moon nor stars.
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Mafia Salad
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Re: Cantrian Sun

Postby Mafia Salad » Sat Mar 04, 2017 9:30 pm

It's always sunny in Cantradelphia.

Millhouse wrote:For me, part of the fun of playing has been thinking about how the world would look with earth physics. I've never seen any real attempt by players to try to explain the world in-game. It would be interesting if there were some kind of Copernicus-esque character in-game presenting new ideas about the physical world.


It was actually stumbling upon the text document of some in game notes I made on an old USB that was the catalyst for this return to Cantr. I haven't seen them in game yet, but Wasi had copies on her when she died and Professor Aldwitch had them as well, (I believe some made it to the Cantr Knowledge Center in Plaekur, but who knows what happened to that library)


My favorite one:

Idea about Sticky Spots
Some places on the island are sticky. They attract resources, animals, and people to them. People and animals are able to move away from them, but they naturally get sucked back to them. Because they are sticky, towns build up at these place.

The easiest thing to see being attracted to the sticky places are resources. All the copper goes into one spot here in Plaekur Forest East. All the wood is collected here too, but the wood moves to Plaekur Forest East slower so you can still see it on the side of the paths when you are walking. But on the paths there is not enough wood to collect while here at the sticky spot in Plaekur Forest East enough wood has gathered that you can collect it. Since more wood and copper are always attracted here the wood and copper never run out either.

It’s harder to see how people and animals are attracted to sticky spots. Because we are strong enough to walk away from the sticky spots. But when a person dies they are no longer strong enough to fight the sticky spot and their body goes right to one.

Another thing that sticky spots let us do is pick stuff up, drop stuff, hand stuff to each other and build stuff. If you tried to hand stuff to another person on a path, then it would no longer be carried by your strength and would go to one of the sticky spots that the paths connect. So you can’t pass stuff between people, drop stuff, or pick stuff up outside of sticky places.

By making a bike, you can move yourself away from the ground, and the power of the sticky spots. So when you are on a bike you can pass stuff between people. But the sticky spots are still strong enough to keep the bike on the paths that go between sticky spots.

An idea about sticky spots by Wasi Caget


In more scientific terms, gravity isn't constant but localized. It's only possible to gather resources or build buildings at those localized points of gravity and travel is only possible on straight line paths between two points of gravity that are close enough to effect each other. She never encountered water so boat travel didn't factor into her thinking.

Trying to explain the world from an in game point of view is delightful. I encourage everyone to try it.
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Meorwen
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Re: Cantrian Sun

Postby Meorwen » Sat Mar 04, 2017 9:43 pm

What if Cantr didn't just have one star but a binary star system or a multiple star system?
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Vanya
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Re: Cantrian Sun

Postby Vanya » Sat Mar 04, 2017 9:59 pm

Mafia Salad wrote:...
What he/she said.
...


Well, THATS a pretty interesting thing about Cantr. Gravitational nodes. But the problem is, as you pointed, the travel by water.

The other theory would be something totally dfferent: cantrian creatures are absurdly short in curiosity and they never go out of obvious paths.
Anyway, even being harder to explain the gravitational stuff, I like it more.

Meorwen wrote:...
Binary star system... or more.
...


Well. Nobody said anything about the number of suns. It could be whatever number between 1 and whatever. *shrugs* Even many suns of different colors, all alternating their shines, like a 80s disco party.
Millhouse
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Re: Cantrian Sun

Postby Millhouse » Sat Mar 04, 2017 10:39 pm

Vanya wrote:Oh, but we actually use square maps in schools and pretty much in most of our non-exact moments of life. Even if the shape of the map doesn´t fit with a spherical world, or if the continents and their shapes are distorted. I can live with that, going from a sphere to a square.
What does not fit at all is going from a cube to a square. Its just too much terrain not being drawn. Like 1/3 or so of the world.


It's a bit more complicated than that. Yes, we use flat maps to depict our round world in RL, but you also move differently on the two (in North America, if you use a map while traveling around Canada, it isn't long before you notice things don't really add up). But in Cantr, traveling in the world is exactly the same as navigating a flat map. There's no distorted land masses. WYSIWYG. There's also that whole thing about instantly transporting from one pole to the other when an imaginary line is crossed. That's why I call it Pac-Man physics. But again, I like to give it a healthy bit of suspended disbelief when it comes to the shape of the world. It makes it easier.
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Wolfsong
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Re: Cantrian Sun

Postby Wolfsong » Sat Mar 04, 2017 11:15 pm

Instead of a sphere, how about a torus? Similar issues?
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Vanya
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Re: Cantrian Sun

Postby Vanya » Sat Mar 04, 2017 11:21 pm

Oh, but then there are no 2 poles. Its just 1 and you have one half on one side of the map and the other half in the other side!!
...
Oh well... I have never travelled so far to see if there is some kind of pole, or something. Im actually somewhat new to the game´s maps.
So its a world with just 1 pole then. Right? Otherwise, if you talk about going to one extreme of the map and, after crossing the end, appearing in the opossite side,... Well, then I only see continuity. Its like when you reach the left or right extremes of a map and you end in the other side. I see no problems with that.

Anyway, I still believe there is some kind of distortion, but since we only use the map, we can´t apreciate it.
For example... In a group of islands where one of my characters is, it can travel by land using a ship. Ok, I know, its just a bug because the graphical side of the game is just an add. If you have a really thin and long mass of land and there are 2 ports, one in one side and the other in the other side, you can actually undock with a ship and you will see the port of the other side like a landing spot. And you can start docking and the ship will cross the land!! It made it faster to travel through the island for me!!

Whatever. A petty excuse for distortion, but I still believe there must be!!

A good example of spherical worlds with square maps that work nice (or somewhat like it) is Rings of Power, a 16-bit isometric game for Sega Genesis and Mega Drive that dates from 1991. The old RPG was actually awesome for its days!!
An open world, tons of dialogues, an awfully big planet with almost uncountable locations, but the most important thing: it had a... somewhat spherical map.
The game was too ambitious for the console. It would have worked better on SNES at least, but the map´s mechanic was the same. Only that you just not "appeared" in the opossite side of the world. You would keep walking and see how everything just started to repeat, reaching the same place you abandoned moments ago. Just like actually walking over a sphere.
Millhouse
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Re: Cantrian Sun

Postby Millhouse » Sun Mar 05, 2017 12:29 am

Wolfsong wrote:Instead of a sphere, how about a torus? Similar issues?


Different issue. The inner circumference of a torus is smaller than the outer circumference. If you were to fold a square piece of paper into a torus the inner circumference (the donut hole) would be wrinkled and creased.
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Vanya
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Re: Cantrian Sun

Postby Vanya » Sun Mar 05, 2017 1:05 am

Anyway, in a thorus you wouldn´t have sun all the time and everywhere. Some places would be in shadows. Perpetually if some other places would have sun all the time.
For me, the only posible answer is a bad map and a Dyson sphere. Sun all the time, enclosed world, no stars nor asteroids nor moon nor any other celestial body than a sun (or any amount of sun-like structures).
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Mafia Salad
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Re: Cantrian Sun

Postby Mafia Salad » Sun Mar 05, 2017 1:43 am

Flat earth with infinite repetition stretching out in every direction. You may think you sailed around the world and arrived back at the same island but you actually arrived at an identical but different one. Infinite suns, each fixed directly above the parallel Cantr Cities.
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Vanya
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Re: Cantrian Sun

Postby Vanya » Sun Mar 05, 2017 2:04 am

Mafia Salad wrote:Flat earth with infinite repetition stretching out in every direction. You may think you sailed around the world and arrived back at the same island but you actually arrived at an identical but different one. Infinite suns, each fixed directly above the parallel Cantr Cities.

Hahahahaha XD
That sounds like Cant-CRAFT

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