So I was reminiscing the other day about the SupCom days and I remembered the Earth/Terra map which took way to long to complete a single game on, but on an actual globe where the player who has australia cant just camp in the corner means player can easily move around the planet. Anyway I was amazed to find that no one had created a mod which ads earth into the game so this post is to hopefully inspire someone with the skills (which is not me) to create this mod. Thanks for reading fell free to leave any comments
Answer is easy: it's not possible. This may change with the release of the server, or it might be a post-release feature.
It's getting the scaling right I personally believe any bigger than scale 5 means game starts to drag and is no longer any fun.
Well, to be more precise it's highly improbable that it's possible to even get close. The terrain generation algorithm can only generate a very limited subset of all possible configurations, even if you had infinite seeds. An earth-like configuration probably isn't possible. I'd link to my thread on the terrain height algorithm, but I'm on a tablet and can't be bothered to.
you guys just sit back and watch this : and this is just in the old Alpha system editor, never got to play on something that big : I believe it is possible. we can get planets big enough.
What? Size is not the limitation. The limitation is getting anything set up like the earth. There aren't hooks I'm aware of for custom terrain height, and the one in-game probably can't do it.
Nah, pretty sure they said "just wait for modders to make the map editor", which is totally understandable, because time and money.
One in the not too distant future may be able to just upload a custom mesh that is however..... resource inefficient.
IMHO, the greater problem of having a manual map editor is: how the game will store that data. Right now, one planet costs only a few kbytes, because all you need are those numbers (radius, seed, water height, etc.) and using the random map algorithm, the game generate the maps. If you make a custom map, which means it cannot be generated using the random map algorithm, the game would have to save every single terrain detail of the planet's surface. And again, when you are going to play with other players, all this data has to be transfered so they can start generating the map. Lets not forget that a 1000 radius planet can consume more than 1 Gbyte worth of RAM (specially if they are rocky type) This is just what I think, not sure if there are others issues
That's pretty much the problem, but a hybrid solution would at least be better than what we have. Create a random planet and then manually place features like trees, metal, and CSG terrain. That could probably be stored in a reasonably sized file.
