Can we make the TILESET bigger?

[Bobbiac]

SIZE=3]hmmmmmm......

ok... lets real ...... most people have a computer with:


Pentium III or better
more than 256MB RAM
gforce3 video or higher
17" 1024x768 monitor
and a decent sound card


So why are the MAPS and not the TILES not getting larger?

With Microsoft coming out with its own civ sim, a lot of age of empires junkies are going to cross over, and if Civ 4 has a larger, more detailed tileset (say 3x's bigger? 2ice as detailed?) the market will stay yours!

also:

a "lite" version to be marketed along side/with this one. It would be a traditional CD-ROM

I definitely would like Civ4 to be a DVD-ROM. That way detailed "battle simulation" movies could be added (and the added attention to the tileset won't be sacrificed by space)

camera contol menu: with a 3X 180 X 180 tileset zooming in the map and minimap becomes imperative! I'd to be able to pan around a "virtual dome", too.[/SIZE]

Please GIVE FEEDBACK!!!!!! ANYTHING.......EVEN FLAMING FOR ALL I CARE!!!!!!!!

[Flandrien1]

You don't need geforce or any other 3d monster to play civ.

[Daz]

What I'd like is a larger map. Huuuge. 1000x1000. And the road/railway concept looks bad and doesnt feel right.

ps. I'm a freak... I know.

[Fosse]

I'd love to see tiles go bye-bye altogether, and be replaced by a spherical map, with locations defined by lattitude and longitude.

Computers have advanced to the point that there is no good excuse for the cylindrical map in a game that's suppossed to represent the world.

[The Mad Monk]

Originally posted by Daz
What I'd like is a larger map. Huuuge. 1000x1000. And the road/railway concept looks bad and doesnt feel right.

ps. I'm a freak... I know.

1000x1000 gooooood.

I became a very happy camper when I realized the 10K total tile maps had given way to 131K tile maps; 1,000K tile maps (megamaps?) would be astounding.

[The Mad Monk]

Of course, we'd better have access to 16K cities and 128K units by then...

[alva]

And it would take several lifetimes to complete a game....

* Grandfather with grandchild on his knee: *
" ooh, I remember when I was still a wee little lad, I settled our first city.
Now it's your turn () son, to take over and continiue the family tradition and enter into the midevil age"

[minke19104]

Originally posted by The Mad Monk
Of course, we'd better have access to 16K cities and 128K units by then...

with 15.9K cities producing 1 shield/turn due to extreme corruption.

[MrBaggins]

There are technical reasons why having 1000x1000 maps is not wonderfully feasible, but its not an issue from a graphics viewpoint:

In a system like this, you use a D3D viewport instead of a view of a single DxDraw plane.

You only calculate, and draw the view that you can see on the screen. Scaling, and fog of war is also a snap; D3D has very mature texture scaling and lighting functionality. I'm leaning towards using D3D in the creation of 'Catapult' for this very reason.

"So what IS the problem with 1000x1000 maps?" you might ask.

For one thing, storage requirement. You need to maintain various layers of basic information about a map tile: terrain type, ownership, improvements, 'contents' and many other game state values. You also need to store per player visibility and fow at least, and maybe action maps... among other things. This can add up to a relative lot of information.

If you could manage all this information in 8 bytes (unlikely) then you'd have 8 meg game saves. Huffman encoding might help... but you might only do as well as, 50% compression with that method.

The other problem is pathfinding and the AI in general. The algorithms don't scale massively well. You can create 'helper maps' to assist the AI in point-point range finding, but at these scales it's unviable, since the map would be (1000x1000)^2=1x10^12=an English Billion or an American Trillion.

It is possible to find workarounds, but many of the workarounds will be brute force efforts, requiring serious CPU requirements.

MrBaggins

[The Mad Monk]

Originally posted by minke19104


with 15.9K cities producing 1 shield/turn due to extreme corruption.

No, we would need that many cities to insure that all 320 civs would have a decent number...

[Daz]

yo... who said you had to settle the whole darn planet on a 1000x1000 map? Why not have uninhabited land?

Lets say there is a big desert. Of course nobody's building there. Not until oil comes into play...

No railway movement cost is not a good thing.

Oh.. and it would be nice not to be able to build roads on mountains (maybe desert). It would make trade more interesting and there could me more bottlenecks which would be fiercely contested and *slaps himself a couple of times*..... sorry, i digress. Got carried away.

[mrboo123]

Originally posted by Bobbiac
(...)ok... lets real ...... most people have a computer with:


Pentium III or better
more than 256MB RAM
gforce3 video or higher
17" 1024x768 monitor
and a decent sound card
(...)

(In sound) Dre-e-e-eam, dream, dream, dream, dream(no-longer singing) If I could have that kind of computer... (Yet, you said MOST people...)

[Maquiladora]

Then your not most people and neither am i. I cant see the point of bigger tiles, maybe for more detail but id spend most of the time zoomed out to watch over my empire anyway.

[Bobbiac]

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+ tax & shipping




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Want to burn your own CDs and watch DVDs on your PC? Take a look at our T2042.

Not that I have any simpathy for E-mahines, but..

[The Mad Monk]

Originally posted by Daz
yo... who said you had to settle the whole darn planet on a 1000x1000 map? Why not have uninhabited land?

Lets say there is a big desert. Of course nobody's building there. Not until oil comes into play...

No railway movement cost is not a good thing.

Oh.. and it would be nice not to be able to build roads on mountains (maybe desert). It would make trade more interesting and there could me more bottlenecks which would be fiercely contested and *slaps himself a couple of times*..... sorry, i digress. Got carried away.

It would also make mountain-based strategic and luxury resources utterly pointless.