Graphics Update: Making things go faster by doing less

that would be fun to have *specific* templates like earth, where it scales

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UV_mapping

Honestly if we /had/ to have a map projection I'd suggest the Winkel-Trapel.

I was actually asking if there was a low-effort way that I could get some unwraps of PA planets

Considering I believe they're generated as a cube and then bashed into shape, it could go either way for difficulty. However, I would suspect that it lands in the 'annoyingly hard' part of the spectrum, due to having to flatten a dented cube.

On a different note: @varrak, who would I need to point a thread at to find out what techniques are used for planet generation?

Try here:
http://allenchou.net/2013/07/bending-solid-geometry-in-planetary-annihilation/

http://www.mavorsrants.com/2013/02/planetary-annihilation-engine.html

Give me those mesas back

If you build walls everywhere and use the positions from the alerts it's actually not hard to do.
http://nanodesu.info/stuff/pa/mods/test2.html
Making a projection with all land details would probably be harder, but for a plain "where is land, where is water, etc" just doing a bunch of queries to the system you use to place buildings would be enough to get the datapoints required. I'd be burning to get such an API call, my current method involves using actually building those walls (thanks for the cheats ) everywhere.

EDIT:
To get some basic coloring I guess the query that returns the mapping points would need to additionally have some information about the point of the map. Like "lava", "ice", "height above sea: 20 meters", etc