OpenCiv3 Discussion thread

[korn469]

this is a thread dedicated to expressing and discussing ideas that should be in civ3...OpenCiv3 although not made by firaxis or even anyone connected with making a commercal civ game before will include all of the great ideas that should go into making civ3 the game it should be...this is the place where we will hammer down those ideas

korn469

[Slingshot]

I had made a similar request (SuperCiv suggestion thread). Are you acting on that request with a similar interest in radical civ ideas? Or are you looking for something that might be incorporated more "short term?"

[korn469]

to establish a strong foundation for OC3 we must decide on the foundamental issues...to me the first of those issues are the map and the time frame...

The Map:

this is the most important issue in any civ game because it effects the game from begining to end...every player interacts with the map on each turn and a realistic map is one of the needs of OC3

my first proposal is for us to use a hex based map instead of a square map like civ/civ2 uses. this would get rid of the unrealistic diagonal moving in civ/civ2 with little disruption of game play. to me a square based map is one of civ2's greatest failures. a hex based map would solve this problem. also a hex map is simple to do and would not present any great programming or hardware issues...but besides just switching to hexes there is another problem present in civ games to date. the maps they represent are not spherical maps...there is no way to cross the poles of the earth and end up on the other side...i do not have a good fix for this yet, but we must make an effort to represent the world in OC3 as a sphere, i am not saying that we should include a spherical map but we should try to simulate a spherical map on a flat surface

however from just a hypotetical stance how hard would it be to represent the world as a true 3D globe with zooming capablities like the globe interface presented by slingshot...could our group overcome the technical challenges presented below?



timespan:

this includes not only when the game runs from but how many turns are in it and how the turns are divided up. i propose that the game start between 4000bce-1000bce and last to 2050ce and that it should take between 500-800 turns...des anyone see problems with this?

what are your thoughts on the map and on the time frame?

korn469

[korn469]

slingshot

maybe these principles could guide us

• is it technically feasable?
• could our group make it work?
• what would the hardware implications be?
• how much time would it take?
• how much does it increase gameplay?
• does it maintain the spirit of a civ game?
• would the idea destroy the gameplay?
• never let best be the enemy of good

if it meets all of those criteria then i say lets put it in, if not lets leave it out...

korn469

[Slingshot]

Looks good to me, Korn! (Besides, I can't find the darn SuperCiv thread I thought I posted )

Although I only played the SMAC demo, it seems that Firaxis did a good job building a future tech tree. In that case, maybe OpenCiv could span from antiquity to, say, 3000AD

[Youngsun]

Korn

Wow! "Openciv3 discussion thread"! I hope this thread will contain many great and innovative ideas from Apolytoners! Good luck!

Slingshot

Keep up the good work! since I regard you as very active Apolytoner as far as this forum is concerned.

One thing that bothers me is that I will have less and less time to come to this forum as my assignments get piled up sob sob

[heardie]

why not like a soccorball world, or is that what you meant?

------------------
-Chiron Creators-
"http://members.xoom.com/acchiron"

[Dobermann]

So what´s the deal here, can anyone post an idea or?
That said

What would you prefer, the current turn based system or simultaneuos turns, as has been suggested in EC3. The pros and cons have been discussed thoroughly, but I think maybe it would be harder to code simultaneuos turns.

[Victor Galis]

"why not like a soccorball world, or is that what you meant?"

-Well, that would mean some of "hexes" would have to be pentagons

I was opposed to the hex idea, before but maybe it would be a good idea in order to set this Civ game apart from the others.

About the map, we should not under any circumstances scrap tiles, they are critcal to all civ games. Terrain should look 3D like in SMAC with Civ 2 looking (but better if we can pull that off) graphics. A spherical world will only come into the picture if we can figure out how to do it well, it should not be put in until late in the game programming process if at all (we can always patch or release future versions).

The current time scale is good enough for me.

Say, has anyone played Age of Wonders? I ask because that game has an option of simo. turns and uses hexes.

Simultaneous turns are evil! Civ is a TBS and simo turns make it too RTS for my tastes. (You could possibly allow the player to manage his cities and such during opponents' turns in Multiplayer to save time.)

[korn469]

ok here is what i was talking about

if you had a paper map wrapped around a globe of the earth and you took a pair of scissors and cut the paper map off of the globe and then laid it flat what would it look like? would the map laid out flat still be an accurate depiction of a round world?

i know that the earth is larger at the equator so would the map look something like that?

   **      **
  ****    ****
 ******  ******
****************
 ******  ******
  ****    ****
   **      **

i think we should use hexes to as victor says, set us apart from other civ games and to make the map a little bit more realistic...we should only use hexes, no hexes and pentagons that is from a simplistic point of veiw

and finally sould we better simulate a spherical world on a flat map? does anyone know how to do that?

korn469
[This message has been edited by korn469 (edited March 12, 2000).]

[raingoon]

Korn, I'm not a cartographer but it seems to me possible that you could have a huge globe like the one you've posted above as well as a flat abstract.

Rarely does a player make their moves while looking at the entire world. Therefore, I think the game should take place on a very large globe, one capable of showing almost an entire hemisphere. You wouldn't even really know it was on a globe unless you zoomed to the furthest viewing points.

An abstract of the flat world would always be visible in the upper right corner, as it is now and the shape would be that flattened world shape, I forget the exact name, that all globe abstractions use.

Thus, the game world interface would appear basically the way it appears in Civ 2 -- until you zoomed out to the global views. And a flat, strategic abstraction of the known world would be visible all the time for bigger picture planning. The military strategizes this way every day, I can't see why we couldn't.

[korn469]

raingoon

i want to use a map that is as easy and natural to play on as the civ2 map, but i hope that we can address these two issues in a simple way...also i though slingshot's spherical map looked awsome!

1. moving one hex at the equator and moving one hex at the one of the poles is not an equal distance

2. you can cross the the poles

one could be fixed in a number of simple ways, movement could require less movement points the further away from the equator you get, or there could be less hexes per row the further away from the equator you get or maybe someother approach that is better than my lackluster suggestions

two is simple. just have certain hexes correspond to other hexes...likeif you are at the south pole and you hit down then you show up at its corresponding hex at the south pole like if we have these hexes

123456789

then moving from hex 9 would put you at hex 4 or something like that

or we could just ignore all of that and have a rectangle hex map

korn469

[Victor Galis]

The solution to #2 is making the poles impassable. No one went to, much less throught them until this century (1910), so that should not be a problem. I say go with a rectangluar type map, and then see if you can do a spherical projection of fun. If one has to be distorted, let it be the globe, which will just be there to look cool, and serve a small world map (doesn't have to be very accurate, as long as you can use it to recenter your map.)

[korn469]

well as long as ICBMs have infinite range then we can have unpassable poles since we don't have to aim the missles over the poles

how big should the normal map size be? i recommend that it be fairly large...how does 48 by 96 sound?

korn469

[VetLegion]

Map...I agree with Victor Galis. The spherical map is an approximation --> check civ ToT for this. Works great.