Bizzare Map Idea

[targon]

During long history, games were impaired by so-called "attribute buffer" approach, hence the tiles everywhere. Nowdays, that thing is obsolete, IMO, and we may in fact use more general means (like polygonal "features", in terms of Xconq). So screen polygons don't affect anything, they're eye candy while mappolygons have a lot of game-related properties, like unit speed modifier etc. I think some of that features aren't for client side either, due to possible cheating.
BTW, Vultur, how you imagine infamous Fog of War technique applied to your "bizzare map" (natural map, inf fact)?

[Blake]

Thats not so bizzare. In fact it's been my intention for a long time to not have unit movement constrained to tile->tile jumps and have the map rendered (basically) as a heightmap.

The coolest way is just to have a function like:
float get_height(float x, float y);
that returns the height at any point on the map.
There would actually be an internal heightmap (raw map data) to specify the general shape of the terrain, this map might have a resolution of 40*40 or something quite small like that.

Then, in the "get_height" function you average the heights of the 4 nearest tiles, and also add some variation from a "detail" function, that could use some sort of randomness or get it's value from another tilable heightmap that might be tiled 10 times over the main map (basically the detail is what targon said a few posts above)

The cool thing about using such a get_height function is you can zoom in or out as much as you want, and the map will be more or less detailed. You do ofcourse need a rendering engine sophisticated enough to work out the polygons that end up on the screen.

Another thing is cities would just be built at a location on the map, giving as absolute co-ordinates rather than tile co-ordinates, armies would move in a simialler way, in fact it would even be possible to eliminate "map polygons" altogether, using a simialler "get_terrain" function that works out what the exact terrain is on the fly. Whether or not that would be a desirable way to do things would be a different matter, because in general you need to divide the map into some sort of polygons/sectors in order to do path finding.
What will probably happen is the raw map data will be used to create map sectors.

Btw there is no particular reason to have Fog of War on planets, as they will be orbited by ships or spacestations capable of making detailed surface scans, while in some cases it might be slightly more realistic to have it (blockaded world?) not needing to store visibility data is a good thing (Remembering each players fog of war is different)

[targon]

float get_height(x, y) =
1) Perlin noise
2) Fractal noise (not Perlin's)
3) Riged multi-fractal
4) "Plasma" (smoothed)
5) Subdivide&Displace? (tooo iterative)

[Leland]

6) NURBS surfaces?

[Vultur]

BTW, Vultur, how you imagine infamous Fog of War technique applied to your "bizzare map" (natural map, inf fact)?

Like RTS games, obvious: if we had a RTS game-like map, I see no reason to have strange/hybrid unit behaviour.
You can immagine a orthogonal projection of the map "seen from the sky" to calculate things like movement/support/view (FoW) radius that look like circles, indipendent from the FINAL look of the 3D map (isometric or "prospective")
The same idea can be applied also for a "space map", if we decide to implement one. I'm currently looking for a good image of the Milk Way Galaxy to use it.

Thats not so bizzare.

Thanks

[Leland]

About space map... is the game "galaxy" (i.e the star systems available to players. This is not necessarily the whole galaxy of course) going to be based on real milky way, or is it going to be fictional/random one that allows you to put a bunch of habitable solar systems in close proximity to each other?

[Vultur]

About space map... is the game "galaxy" (i.e the star systems available to players. This is not necessarily the whole galaxy of course) going to be based on real milky way, or is it going to be fictional/random one that allows you to put a bunch of habitable solar systems in close proximity to each other?

It's just to have a nice reference, but for obvious reasons the galaxy will be fictional.
Note: not the whole galaxy is colonizable, and this reduce the playable area".
The image, from a science magazine, shows where Earth-like planet are in a galaxy Milk Way-like. (Section in violet)
Near to the center there are too many radiations, farther too few metals. It's possible to allow the colonization in planet in this state, but will be more difficult/dangerous/...

[Jeremy Buloch]

Sounds good I support this idea of having a part of the galaxy that is habitable.
-J.B.-

[Straybow]

Astronomers keep finding there are more exceptions when it comes to metals concentrations in galaxies. Pretty soon the "rules" will be the exceptions.

Seriously, though, the scale of a whole galaxy dictates an entirely different kind of game than what we've been considering for StelPol.

[Leland]

If I recall correctly, Milky Way is something like 70,000 light years in diameter. Having a "sandbox" of 200-1000 ly across would probably be big enough for the game purposes, yet it'd be just a small dot on the map of the whole galaxy. It would also not be too much of a stretch to just handwave away the quality and quantity of colonizable solar systems in that area.

The thing is, how to limit the colonizable/playable area? What prevents the player from just steering his ship in straight line until it reaches whatever place in the galaxy he wants to be in? What if he wants to go back to earth for example, what happens?

[Kuciwalker]

Here's one explanation: the Earth no longer exists. Do to the catastrophic increase of mass of the population of America, the Earth collapsed into a black hole :P

[Jeremy Buloch]

The "Exodus" stated that the aliens would neutrilize all intelligent life from Earth not destroying Earth. If Gateway has kept it that way then the Earth wouldn't turn into a Black hole, it would stay there.
-J.B.-