Spherical Map

[mrmielke]

or better yet, come directly over to the freeciv forums , something might start to happen if some spherical-world supporters show up...

[padillah]

Why is everybody making MORE edges?

Less edges is the key - Triangles! You can implement as many as you see fit and still have a sphere or something quite like it.

Has no one here done 3D ray-tracing? Sheesh.

Tom P.

[mrmielke]

well, using triangles will solve _one_ problem - all tiles will be the same shape. but it won't solve the other: you will still have areas in the map where the geometry bends, resulting in triangle-corners where less triangles touch. the number of these areas depends on the underlying geometry. the only uniform tilings of a "sphere" with triangles are the basic tetrahedron and the basic octahedron - with four and eight faces (=tiles), respectively.

also, I find triangular tiles quite awkward in terms of maneuvering. in hexagonal tiles, at least you can walk a straight line through the tile - in a triangle, you always have to "turn", so you walk a zigzag path.

[padillah]

Don't forget the duodecahedron (20 facets). And there are others, I have seen a 100-sided dice before, but it was made from quadrilaterals (diamod-shaped to be specific).

There's a few other shapes out there that are "spherical" enough to get the job done. Not being a geometrist I can't rattle them off the top of my head.

As for movement - that's why they didn't make a spherical map. Everything you can make a sphere out of is really awkward to move through. Someone mentioned a geodesic dome, that's not the slightest bit symetrical and could be made of shapes with almost random number of sides. Pathfinding would be a nightmare.

The simplest form of the geodesic sphere is the football (soccer ball for us Americans) and that has two different shapes to contend with. The strategies based on settling on a hexagon vs. a pentagon alone would cause most to question game balance.

Face it, unless you remove the tile-based aspects of the game, or settle for a "cheat" (like some of the stuff geeslaka was talking about) you are not going to get a sphereical map that's fair, balanced, and useful.

BTW: what would a spherical map lend to the game anyway? I don't zoom out far enough to see the globe most of the time. I can't imagine why it makes this much of a difference.

Tom P.

[Vince278]

With a spherical map you can move over the poles instead of taking the long way around.

(Didn't this thread have a different name? )

[padillah]

If that's the big deal I agree with geeslaka, just use some form of transform that moves the units to the appropriate tile as if it were a sphere.

As you zoom out it would appear as a globe, just like now and the end result of the effect would be the same.

It wouldn't even take real difficult math.

Tom P.

[Azuarc]

Let's suppose that the movement and tiling system were completely refined in a Civ 5. Instead of discrete chunks of movement, you had much smaller tiles which your units would move over, and obviously get more than one movement per turn then. It would allow for more varied city growth. It would allow for more realistic movement systems. It might make the game have a little less of a board game feel to it, but just think if our current map tiles were split into 3x3 sub-tiles. Consider what that would do to the game, and then with that in mind, translate it to a spherical grid that uses, say, Padillah's triangles.

Also, keep in mind, the Earth is not a perfect sphere. It's darn close, but the equator is not as long as the Prime Meridian. (or vice versa, I forget which.) So we don't need total perfection. An elliptoid that is very close is satisfactory. (For display purposes, ideally you would have a sphere, though.)


Regarding movement about the poles, I think we would need to add tech bonuses that allow units to advance through the cold. It wasn't until the 19th century that someone actually reached either pole, and with good reason. Watching bare-chested warriors trudge through arctic ice is confusing to say the least. I'm not sure the best way to implement this, though, because even now most people don't casually cruise through the north pole.

However, doing the mapping thing is gonna be a little weird unless you do, in fact, not have a pure rectangular grid, because there should be fewer spaces near the poles. That's the point of great circle paths that planes fly in.

[ScreamingCube]

Couldnt you continue to use squares for most of the tiles, and then have triangles for the poles?


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Like that, but not drawn in crappy ascii-esque art?

[padillah]

Originally posted by ScreamingCube
Couldnt you continue to use squares for most of the tiles, and then have triangles for the poles?


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Like that, but not drawn in crappy ascii-esque art?

The argument against this would be that not all tiles would be the same size. As the squares were wrapped around the spheroid they would tend towards trapezoids:

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My question is: what, in the game mechanics decrys the need for all tiles to look the same? So what if one is bigger than the other? So long as the amount of "corn" provided is "one tiles worth" the game will work fine.

What is the big deal with misshapen tiles? As long as no tile provides a movement or access bonus (like the combination of 5 and 6 sided tiles. 6 sided tiles would have acces to more secondary tiles and thus provide a balance shift).

I don't see any obstical to visualizing the game in any manner you wish. The size and shape of the tiles are arbitrary and of no real significance to the game (except as noted above).


Tom P.

EDIT: I don't mean to be mad at you ScreamingCube, but rather at the people that are making this 3,000 times more complicated than it needs to be for reasons I can't begin to understand.

You'r suggestion is as good as any (and better than some) but there are players that will not like it because it "looks" whonky.

[mrmielke]

@Vince278: this thread was always named as it is now, there's another thread here dealing with the same problem.

@padillah: the icosahedron is the 20-facet polygon. the duodecahedron (or dodecahedron, as it is more often called) has 12 facets, all pentagonal. all regular polygons with identical faces are called platonic bodies, and there's a _very_ limited amount of them. everything with more faces is most probably a tesselation product: you take a platonic body and subdivide the faces, then push all vertices ("corners") outward so they are on a (virtual) sphere surface.
and in all of those tesselation products, you will _have_ to deal with irregular areas, as I described. but as you said yourself, this does not have to stop us from using it, as long as the game engine is programmed accordingly. if you define each tile center as a "node", connected to the surrounding nodes, pathfinding should be rather easy.

[Vince278]

Originally posted by mrmielke
@Vince278: this thread was always named as it is now, there's another thread here dealing with the same problem.

Thanks, but that wasn't it. I think it was entitled something like "Squares, Hexes, or Octagons".

The same subject was discussed but in greater depth.

[OutsiderSubtype]

I sort of like the idea of a province system - who says they have to be polygons? This would be especially awesome if the game could make the size and shape of the provinces reflect their terrain. Now as to the technical feasibility of generating random worlds like this, I don't know.

[padillah]

Let's face one fact, Civ is a turn-based, tile-based game. They've already taken steps to remove the turn-based aspect and replace it with a timer, if we get rid of the tile based aspect as well it'll be another Age of Something.

That's not the game I want to play.

At some point you have to enjoy the game you are playing, otherwise you're just forcing the issue.

Tom P.

[Cptn Fancypants]

Imperialism II had an interesting take on the map issue. Its map was a cylindrical projection, with the cylinder tiled by hexagons (graphically, they were latitudinal strips of squares, with square centers staggered between latitudes). Non-border tiles had neighbors at NE, E, SE, SW, W, and NW.

Landmasses were randomly generated collections of tiles. Each landmass was randomly carved into Provinces. The provinces were roughly large hexagons, but with enough irregularity in the composition of each province to make for interesting province adjacencies.

Resources were collected at the tile level, but all land troop movement was conducted at the province level. This required a very rigid military strategy system, but one so simple that the AI for it was easily programmed and was programmed well. The rigid military strategy system rendered distance calculations immaterial, since (1) battles were always conducted between adjacent provinces, (2) units moved (unlimited distances) on one turn could not attack on that same turn, and (3) only one attack per turn was allowed for attacking units.

That high level of military strategy made the game Not Civ, but it was a nice game.

Ultimately, I don't think Civ can be made more fun or entertaining by introducing better geometry. Except for hexes. Hexes would be nice.

[mrmielke]

Originally posted by padillah
My question is: what, in the game mechanics decrys the need for all tiles to look the same? So what if one is bigger than the other? So long as the amount of "corn" provided is "one tiles worth" the game will work fine.

What is the big deal with misshapen tiles? As long as no tile provides a movement or access bonus (like the combination of 5 and 6 sided tiles. 6 sided tiles would have acces to more secondary tiles and thus provide a balance shift).

I don't see any obstical to visualizing the game in any manner you wish. The size and shape of the tiles are arbitrary and of no real significance to the game (except as noted above).

actually, p, I don't really understand your point. the whole point of having pentagonal tiles in the icosa-based hexagonal model is making it work. there simply isn't a way to tile a planet (=sphere) without having certain spots where there are tiles that have less neighbors than all the others. even if you make weirdly shaped tiles, the problem persists. the pentagons are not the problem, they are the fix. a city in direct vicinity of a pentagonal tile only has exactly one tile less in its radius. and if the pentagonal tiles have some little resource bonus, the problem of having less neighbors is countered.