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Originally posted by LDiCesare
To me, what is important about the spherical world is not the rendering but the topology. I hate it on Mercator maps when it takes forever to move from Norway to Quebec. It should be faster than going from Africa to South America, yet the 2D projection has to distort distances (I made a polar projection Earth map in CtP2 to prevent that, but you still have distorsions, so you cannot have a nice north-pole area and a nice southern hemisphere on the same map).
So my point of view is: I'd be happy with a spherical map model, and a flat view where we draw the polygons visible from the center of the map. Thus at max zoom, the map would look like a disk, with every border of the map touching the opposite border, and with distance distortion near the edges, but I'd rather have some distortion than a sphere I'd have to rotate everytime I want to compare the size of my Pacific and Atlantic fleets.
To me, what is important about the spherical world is not the rendering but the topology. I hate it on Mercator maps when it takes forever to move from Norway to Quebec. It should be faster than going from Africa to South America, yet the 2D projection has to distort distances (I made a polar projection Earth map in CtP2 to prevent that, but you still have distorsions, so you cannot have a nice north-pole area and a nice southern hemisphere on the same map).
So my point of view is: I'd be happy with a spherical map model, and a flat view where we draw the polygons visible from the center of the map. Thus at max zoom, the map would look like a disk, with every border of the map touching the opposite border, and with distance distortion near the edges, but I'd rather have some distortion than a sphere I'd have to rotate everytime I want to compare the size of my Pacific and Atlantic fleets.
We really should move this discussion to a map thread, or start a new one on 3D effects of maps. Otherwise the discussion will have the risk of being lost in this side thread eventually. Also, we should look at the old threads pertaining to this topic, much of this discussion has been covered in one way or another already. Unfortunately with the search feature only searching back a few months, it may be hard to find the best threads if we can't locate them off the web page. primemover, you want to start a new thread on "3D maps" or some such? When we find the old discussions we can put links to them. One crude way to find them is just to go back browsing the thread names, looking for relevant words.
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