Spherical worlds weeeeeeeeee

[hugebanana]

How impossible would it be to support fully spherical game maps, like planets in miniture. This would allow for attacking from any direction (just go around the world) sending things into orbit etc. And no more borders!

Disclaimer: the above suggestion may be impossible, already beaten to death or just plain retarded.

[AF]

Make a patch!

[SinbadEV]

Effectively impossible with our current system, but desirable.

[KDR_11k]

MTR, no?

[manored]

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

[smoth]

DO

NOT

WANT!

[imbaczek]

this would require a more or less total rewrite of the engine. IOW, no-go.

[manored]

DO

NOT

WANT!

Why not? Sounds freaking cool :)

[zwARREN69]

That would be neat. However, as stated, this would require a complete overhaul of the engine or a new engine entirely. Most strategy games do not have this. Blizzard implemented pseudo-teleports that would load in new maps, which gave the illusion of a bigger world. Thats the only viable option, given the engine. I doubt anyone is really bothered by current map system, so I wouldn't expect to see a big change. All the same, cool idea.

[manored]

Its one of those things that everone wants, but no one wants TO DO :)

I Imagine it would be even cooler if there could be spherical planets set in space, like Spore's final phase is gonna be, but that would probally be wanting way too much :)

[Forboding Angel]

/stab
/stab
/stab

[KDR_11k]

Would be a crapload of work since you'd have to remove any code that assumes a rectangular map made of squares.

[manored]

Why people around here always have violent reactions then I mention Spore? :)

[hugebanana]

Out of interest, what would be the single hardest aspect of coding this? And what about a cheap knockoff version, where the edges wrap horizontally or vertically (but it isn't truly spherical).

[KDR_11k]

One problem is adjacency. Ranges are measured by using coordinates, the wraparound would cause a huge difference in coordinates and calculating that won't be easy. There's a CRAPLOAD of checks for various ranges.

[SinbadEV]

Edge warping could be done "easily" with LUA... real spheres would basically a a rewrite of every aspect of the code, effectively none of the current code base would be useful in the creation of a real sphere world. ( Obviously certain parts of the code could be used to inform the creation of the new engine and things like model format interpretation, script interpretation, OGL calls, the lobby and interface stuff... but it still constitutes making a whole new game with this idea implemented from the getgo )

[hugebanana]

IOC. Well, there's probably some good reason why we havn't seen too many commerical games utilise the sphere concept anyway

I might have a go at the edge wraparound thing one day. If most of the vector maths is abstracted then I don't think it would be to hard.

[SinbadEV]

This is probably okay.

This would be really cool.

[CarRepairer]

One LRPC could shoot you from either side. And from above and below.

[imbaczek]

there is spore, there was popoulus 3 IIRC... anything else?