Spherical worlds weeeeeeeeee

[SinbadEV]

I'd be happy if we could figure out a way to have textures not be horribly stretch on steep verticals.

[manored]

Wouldnt be fun to see all terrain units such as spiders stick to "ceilings" and bombard enemy units bellow? :)

this sort of thing is not good in an rts. Units will be obscured and you will spend too much time fighting with camera angles to see shit.

As much as I would like to see bridges over water, having shit on the bottom of the bridge would be baaaaaaad.

There could be hot-keys to automatically invert the camera angle :) and there could be a command to "desintegrate" land and thus give you direct look and command possibility at hanging or underwater units...

[MadRat]

I did a little test with a spherical world with 6 heightmaps mapped similar to cubemapping, and there seem to be even more problems:

5, creating 6 heightmaps that connect on the edges is a pain, AFAIK no heightmap generator (terragen, l3dt) can actually do that.
6, collision detection with the heightmap will be heavier on CPU, because you can't compare Y position, you have to compare distance from the center of the sphere.

I'm not so sure you need to get that complicated. The curved space is more of a visual perspective, not really one you want to concern yourself for calculations. It is best to figure such things as a perpetually flat world with mirror images of the map on each periphery of the original. Think of billiards; when you aim a shot off the bumper you mentally draw a picture of the table mirrored at the point of the bumper and aim at the imaginary hole in space.

[MadRat]

Yeah now what about projectiles crossing the edge, range detection, adjusting the pathfinding, ...

There is a way to figure out positions for all of that. Its a perspective problem, not something insurmountable. The solution may be more appropriate for OpenRTS then Spring, but it is definitely something conquered many times in the past.

[rattle]

Yeah, except that the games were designed that way from the beginning on (Populous 3 for example) rather than changed in the middle.

[AF]

Populous isnt really a sphere world at all, its just designed to 'look' like one.

[PicassoCT]

I already know it is not possible, i really liked that Idea, but the Discussion is quiet pointless... so why am i still here? To imagine myself standing right beside when Smoth read this, to see his head grow from read to purple, to hear those sounds of hate & agony over those stupid morons crowding the spring board- do your hear it the boom- boom - boom- those are not the footsteps of some Giant coming Closer - those are heart Beats of Hate.

So let the Flames begin! Panda unleash him... everybody get away from the keyboards, run, run...

+1 for spherical worlds in Spring- and the Planet should have the same sort of red colour&PeweeScale discussed in some older Thread... Muhahahaha, i am a Firestarter, twisted firestarter

[smoth]

GOD DAMNIT!

[rattle]

For the emperor!

[PicassoCT]

Sucesss- this is the End of the World!!! And it is plane, flat - and there is void water below - the Game is over...

Its not a Bug its a feature... we are the first game to support discworldshapped Levels...

[manored]

Thats only because no other games stoped between square-ball. :)

[AF]

If I were to implement multiple spherical worlds from scratch in a brand new game engine though, how would it be done?

[PicassoCT]

I always wanted ParllelWorlds, were the Game (because of 1 Pewee HP) ends diffrent - so if i loose, i hit my "Sliders"Key and face epic disastrouse defeat in another dimension...

But everybody said it would be to CPU Consuming to run spring 512 Times side by side... Honestly, don´t you think the Devs are a bit lazzy to not fullfill this little feature Request, who would just need some centurys more of optimising ?

Yet, there is a secret Cheat code for Slides, Sphericalworlds and othere Great Features
InGame 2 Times:
Ctrl+Alt+Del

Hit it!

[AF]

I thought that only rebooted your computer if you were runing windows 9x?

[manored]

Pararel dimension games would be no fun... games happening in multiple maps at once, each having separate econ, and you being able to teleport stuff between then using expensive machinery would be interesting tough :). For an other genre I also think that having the ability of travelling to the past and changing your own future actions would be cool, tough it would need a solution for the paradox this would cause.

[Hoi]

MTR, no?

Most likely YTR :)

What the guy there suggested would be immensely cool, made me remember of spore and wanted it to have already been released

spore:):) want it too

for everyone that does know what t is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSreOOg93Zk part1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVmvWih6 ... re=related 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-k2xttu ... re=related 3

[PicassoCT]

I want a MultiplayerTetrisminigame whenever a Conbot has to built something.. And i want a Kataramiunit to collect Scrap- and once it is Worldsized - even Building and Units..

Another GreatIdea would be easy to personalize HolographicFlags (like the HLspraytags) over your MainBase&Army.

And i think the Radartower should be replaced with Robotic-Poledancer

Bestofallideas would be to Massteleport your whole Base to another Area in case of Emergency...

Feel the Power of the Epic Derailgun...

And you could have at least half around world, by doing a sort of HamburgerHill with VoidWater everything else.. sort of thought about doing that to Intercontinental for a While.. Abandoned the Idea, because Gibraltar would be the highest Point and water impossible....

[manored]

spore:):) want it too

for everyone that does know what t is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSreOOg93Zk part1

I WANNA

[AF]

I never mentioend parallel universes or anything

But how would you implement it? Does nobody want to answer that? Doesnt that sort fo defeat the whole point of the discussion?

[jcnossen]

In some experimental code I've mapped the 6 heightmaps from cube faces to a sphere, which I think is the most used method (Not that many engines are supporting this anyway, but the few that do (such as infinity) do it this way). It has a lot less distortion than a single rectangle mapped to a sphere.
It still has an afwul many game code implications though, as you can't just compare y positions with terrain height, when doing collision detection or placing objects on the map. Everything starts to become dependent on the gravity field.