FLAT MAP for gaming

I did play a few games now and it is really annoying scrolling and playing factories and giving move commands and and and ..... ,
and actually it cannot be so much of a problem to include this in Beta and see how the community reacts.

Do you mean flat = not a planet?

no flat like a projection of the planet surface to a flat surface including all sorts of projection tricks.

(earth is round too but we never look something up a globe - we take a flat map to do this even at very small scale)

That's a great idea. We can do a Medieval version of Planetary Annihilation where the Earth is flat, and of course there is only one planet. Resources are limited to wood and fire, and there is no air force, apart for miracles and angels.

Then you go around burning down villages that do not agree with your political/religious view. Because, they're bad people. That's because.

How long does it take to change completedly core concept and everything of a game? After all it's still in beta...

Kidding

Ok, so Uber will be doing somekind of "minimap". But this will be more a tool for an overview.
Flat maps will nit be there in this game. (maybe someone will do a mod in the future for this).

Flat maps are an antithesis of what this game was designed to be.

Flat-Map projections are flawed, as unwrapping a sphere and mapping it to a flat plane is pretty much impossible without distortion. (or looking really odd)

It would also mess with the human mind.
What I mean is that you'd have to be concious about units walking over the edge of the screen appearing on the other side again. I think that would require even more getting used to than spherical maps do.

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/flat-metal-planets.54722/
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/spherical-maps-will-be-this-games-downfall.54782/
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/flat-map-as-standard.54146/

Please, please, please search before bringing out a thread like this. It tends to cause a lot of strife without getting a whole lot done. Uber spent multiple months getting Spherical planets to work, getting the math for the procedural generation for the spherical planets to work, an designing the game - around spherical planets. I think they would much rather modify the way strategic icons are displayed, or implement some alert system, instead of scrapping months of work just so the audible minority can have flat maps.

Flat maps will be done by the modding community. Where there is a will, there is a way. The way, in fact, should be rather easy in this case assuming Uber gives us the mod flexibility that they have implied (read: implied means "Which I'm hoping for," not which "Uber has explicitly promised").

No, it is not an antithesis. If it were the whole concept of drawing maps today on earth is an antithesis. And I wonder why military maps are still flat if they are so impossible to deal with.

The current round map with is too on a flat screen (in case you did not notice that your display is not a globe) which makes it distorted in the first place.

The orientation problem is even more messy, besides I do not think that walking over edges and appearing on the other side is so much do adept too. Now the units walks out of your vision and are not seen anymore (unless you give up some other vision to see it again.

This is a matter of one equation which just projects and I do not mind if it is faulty it is still beta and than the devs can see if the spherical map is still used.
I think the map were you play all the time is more important than an alert system. After all in previous games there was not an alert system, but still you servilely lack vision in this game so to know anything which is going on on the other side of the planet you need something to tell you which would be obsolete if you could just see it in the first place

I'll try this again;

The game ' Planetary Annihilation ' was designed from the ground up to be played on spherical planets. If you do not like this vision for the game, wait for modding support.

Military maps don't cover an entire planet.

And the projection onto the monitor is perfectly accurate. Do you think looking out of the window of a plane gives you distortion? Man, if that's the case, think of those poor astronauts in space, looking out of the flat windows of the International Space Station.

And what of the other planets? Even if you flatten one planet, and look at the whole thing, you still won't see other moons, planets, or asteroids that are orbiting about.

A flat projection is obsolete if you have multiple objects to fight across. No amount of "it is still beta and the devs can see" is going to fix that.

It is also a matter of the following:

Projectile gravity. Currently all projectiles are attracted to the gravitational centerpoint of the body they are launched from. A flat map doesn't have a gravitational centerpoint, it has a gravitational vector.
Interaction with the system map. How are flat maps displayed? How do they act as planets? How is their mass/volume treated?
Order lines. Order lines (those arrows you see) are currently wrapped around the map in a spherical fashion; this requires a lot of math.
Random generation. Generating a square map is easier, but it still something entirely different from generating a sphere. Uber would have to write a custom algorithm just for flat maps.
Orbital layer. How would orbital units interact with the flat map? They're currently designed to exist in a shell around a spherical body.
Water. How would water work on a flat map when it is designed to be a volumetric body?
Asteroid impacts. How do you have a flat asteroid impact a flat planet? Flat physics?

Please think about the implications and facts before making a statement like this.

Dude if you dont like spherical maps go back to supcom since this obviously is not the right game for you and as sad as it might make you they are not going to change it because of you.

EXACTLY.

Maybe its only me but i prefer having a minimap too.

You rong .
There are many ways to unwrapping a sphere into a flat field, its just think a bit.

Yes, there are many ways. All of them distort the sphere's surface to some extent.
The less distorted the new 'flat' sphere would be projected, the stranger the shape of the flat surface you'd have to use.



All of the above images are distorted in some form or another, some of them rather drastically, except one; the globe.

If you'd like more information check out wikipedia's article on map projection. There are over 40 different accepted methods for projecting the surface of the Earth onto a flat plane.
All are flawed in some way, as each uses different constraints and attempts to achieve different goals.

Just to be clear, people are not saying you can't turn a sphere into a flat map. They're saying you can't do it without distorting the surface.

Relevant wiki link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_projection#Metric_properties_of_maps

Please bear in mind that the alert system right now is still in it's early stages. Also, the multi window system has yet to be completed (at least the first pass of it has yet to be completed), which will change things. And there is supposedly experiments with minimaps being done.

From Dev post on the subject, the game could support flat planets, you just need to change some assumptions the game makes (as of when those post were made many moons ago). So I expect a mod for this to come out not terribly long after we have access to the server, then we can compare Uber's vision witha flat game.

Spherical gameplay is one of the best components of PA.

Yeah, it's different, and that's part of what makes it so good.

Changing the best component of PA would be a mistake.

I am putting my voice out there against this kind of idea. I do not want to see a distorted flat map view of the world. Having the planets as a sphere is very advantageous (since you can see them coming over the horizon twords you) aswell as get a real feel for all your options pertaining to movement. I fear the programming and design back up made by trying to create such a system. Don't get me wrong, for those who would preffer to stay with a flat map, then maybe it should be explored as a Mod, but I do not support it being a feature of the game.

I love this game as is let alone the expected product at full release. My main concern is over the delay in this type of system being added as a feature from the developers. Either way id vote against this system unless you could assure me that it is optional and would not delay or hinder the project anymore.