3D Terrain a gimmick?

There are few issues/problems with how it is done in that video.
The north and south pole gets horribly warped and malformed.
How would the camera rotation work when you go past the north or south pole?
What happens when you pass the west or east edge in the pacific ocean or would that be avoided by centering the world map on your current position?

I think it would be possible to work it out but remember that you will play an RTS on several orbital bodies which you might have never seen before unlike earth.

Hopefully the devs will allow modders to play around with the camera so that we can try out different projections.

Yeah the video isn't perfect - but the idea is sound. I think the core of it is that rather than ANY sort of minimap solution, a zoom-to-strategic map is what the game needs. It keeps the fluid maneuverability of the strategic zoom, gives the players a consistent angle and perspective of the battlefield, allows for a two-motion (zoom out, zoom in) navigation of the entire planet, and never forces the player to go looking somewhere other than the main screen for all the information he needs.

It would not be difficult to have a zoom out to a strategic view where the current planet is the main view, and you get a set of windows along the bottom for each additional planet - click to bring that planet up, zoom in on location.

Planetary rotation would be a thing of the past, just like scrolling the edges of the map became obsolete in Supcom..

Camera points would really help too, like it Starcraft 2. You use Ctrl+F buttons to set camera locations and then the F key takes you directly to that location

Long thread of argument. *sigh*

In my gameplay experience, the globular map turned out great. It gives you the feeling that you are "on the other side of the world" compared to the other player -- and, well, you are. Working with a 2D map, you are simply in one of the 4 corners and I suppose it's no different except it introduces various other gameplay artifacts that should never have been there to begin with.

Personally I see the globe as a great feature, but of course it makes things like the minimap kind of difficult to make. I don't think very many people here will agree with your idea to rollback the spherical worlds for the sake of helping with this difficulity though.

Radar coverages are essentially two-dimensional (them being the surface of the sphere), perhaps their readouts can be represented in a "minimap" of sorts, to the right effect.

double post? i never do that! wasn't my fault. :lol:

globally speaking [pun intended], i think any time the devs spend reverse engineering a minimap is wasted.

remember, this game needs to be marketable and playable but also bring something new to the table to be a success. if they can pull it off and find ways to make it work, this will be their golden ticket. clinging to tried and true (and well known and familiar) mechanics will not help.

hopefully they will succeed in finding a way to make the global interface work. I believe our input should be along those lines, not in begging to backpedal to old, familiar solutions. if crunch time is looming and it still doesn't work (toward the end of beta), THEN it's time to go with Plan B (minimaps and other 2d renderings) but until then I think we should be pushing ourselves to embrace the 3d global map and adapt.

keep in mind that any change - even change for the better - is often uncomfortable and sometimes painful.

The maps will be spheres, it is the whole point of this game. It will never step back to 2d map rendering and if it does many people would simply want their money back because they backed a game where we were told the goal is planetary battles on PLANETS (i.e globes).

As for a minimap honestly zooming in and out is enough. Having a small transparent globe in the corner with radar readings would be acceptable and if done correctly wouldn't clutter the UI hopefully. Once the multi-window feature is in that will be my "mini-map". 2 quarter monitor screens zoomed out looking at the planet. A half window looking at my base and a whole window on another monitor for all my actions and controls to takes place =)

Some technical thoughts on this topic:

The difference between the globe that is unwrapped in the video above and an PA planet is that the PA planet is a geosphere. That means it is build out of not warped triangles or quads.
See: http://www.mavorsrants.com/2013/02/plan ... ngine.html (scroll down for the in-engine shots)
The "geometry" of the unwrapped globe (in that video) is warped, the polygons it is build of become smaller towards the pole's. That's why the pole regions got stretched when the unwrapping is performed.
Besides the fact that you can't use the unwrapping method used in that video on a PA planet because of its topology, you can't introduce a map distortion for a PA planet. Why? What will happen with unit movement paths and speed, what will happen to buildings placed on the surface? You would have to stretch and distort them also. And I'm already hearing people complaining about "Why are my units moving faster on the poles?" and all kinds of stuff. You would have to explain that mechanic to the player in a reasonable way.

So, in essence this means you have a non-warped surface on your PA planet already (geosphere), so why not simply map it to a flat surface? Do a google image search for "unwrapping geosphere" and you will see why.
Ragelinking some random image: http://hmshunteruni.files.wordpress.com ... sphere.jpg
(from this page: http://hmshunteruni.wordpress.com/2013/ ... ax-uvwrap/)
This example is actually from a UV unwrap within 3D Studio max, that is trying the reverse of what you want to do. That is mapping a flat image (your desired 2D Map) onto a geosphere (PA planet) without distortion.
To illustrate the effect, peel an egg an place a curved chunk of the shell on your table. Press it down with you hand to "unwrap" it. See what happend? (see 2. below)

So two possible ways to do that:
1. Get a distorted map, with warped unit movements, buildings and other weird stuff.
2. Get a ripped-apart map with units jumping from one quad to another, buildings spread around and other much more weird stuff.

So I don't have any clue how a 2D map would be possible.
You could make an almost featureless version where the map distortions would hardly be noticeable, but then you will still get the the f***ed up unit movement and its hard to tell where you are on the map.

So that holographic globe is a way better attempt with some tweaking needed to distinguish between fore- and background more easily. Or some radar only solution that is fixed to the camera position and doesn't bother about map topology. (anyone remember the Wingcommander radar?)

The goal is not an undistorted map to play on though - the goal is to be able to zoom out and get a strategic overview of the entire planet. Yes, you would have distortion at the edges.. but if you have a system that centers the view on where you are looking, it's not hard to understand the edges are distorted - we already deal with that with strategic icons on the planet's edge (distances between units are distorted).

The biggest advantage of a flat-map strategic zoom is that you can move to any part of the planet with a zoom out/ zoom in - arguably one of the most useful aspects of the strategic zoom in Supreme Commander.

Yes, if you leave the surface features out of the process and reduce the "minimap" / strat-zoom to be more like a radar you would reduce the visibility of the distortion.

Yes, we deal with this because its a natural distortion. You know that you are looking onto a sphere so its obvious that distances near the edges are warped. But distortion on a flat map is not obvious or natural and you will have to communicate this to the players in some way.

This is why I would prefer a 'zoom to strategic view' instead of some kind of mini map. It's MUCH easier to see the distortion if you can see a smooth animation between the globe and flat view, and even easier if you can shift the flat view around to be centered on where you are looking on the globe. I imagine the effect would be very similar to looking through a fish-eye lens.

Hm, I really can't like that idea, sorry.

First I see huge technical difficulties presented by that unwrapping. The whole engine is targeted towards this sphere layout. I don't think there is a reasonable way of modifying the planet geometry at runtime without breaking all kinds of stuff.
Maybe it would be possible to use a second sphere, not a geosphere, overlaying the real planet and rendering the finished surface map of the planet onto this sphere when planet generation is finished. Then you would show and unwrap this sphere to your map an a certain zoom-level (or use it as minimap)
That's the technical side.

From a gameplay perspective you have still the distortion. The real problem here is the sphere to flat map thing. Not important if its a minimap or a strat-zoom, same issue.
And an animation is another story all together. Do you really want an animation to play EVERY time you zoom out? A lot of more pro-like gamers will be p***ed of by that, I'm sure.

If Uber shall invest so much resources (time + manpower) into implementing some kind of flat-map system, why then bother with the spherical planets at all?

I would really encourage everyone to scrap the idea of any kind of flap-map for this game and come up with some alternative ideas on this matter. The source of all this issues is missing info from game side to the player. We don't need a flat map if the game can provide us the needed information in another way.
For example I very much like this idea: viewtopic.php?f=71&t=49275

I'm with ya on this. I love this game right now because spheres :mrgreen: sure the camera zoom in/out could use some work, like remembering where you were on the sphere when you zoomed out so that zooming back in isn't a pain.

Bit really, for a game based around planets/spheres, and a game that supposed to break boundries when it comes to the rts genre, we really need to start thinking past the flat map.

Stating the obvious, the UI is not complete - I wouldn't judge Sphere maps until the more work has been done. Alpha is Alpha.

Also this was never going to be FC2 - going from flat to sphere was always going to change the way the game could be played. In someways it's like another sort of Fog Of War - you can't see the whole picture. Much like a commander in the real world can't. You have to make guesses based on limited information and hope you get it right. That to me makes it better & in fact adds strategy into the game - it means what might be an obvious hole in someone defense on a flat map actually gets missed on a sphere.

Give players every bit of information they need & you might as well watch machines play each other. Limit the information forces people to guess, fill in the blanks and there in lies the intrigue, the struggle the excitement of exploiting a tactic your enemy missed.

I'm afraid it won't work that way.

If you project or unwrap the actual 3D planet mesh and the units upon it, then those distortion effects are directly translated into the positions of units. Thus, units that were close together may suddenly be quite far apart, and vice versa. There is no feasible way that the game can be sensibly contiguous amongst different clients when each client has a genuinely different 3D space idea as to where the units are. Each client would operate under the system that each unit was at a different two dimensional location on your unwrapped or projected map. Units that may be able to fire upon each other on one machine would be unable to on another. It would be horrendous.

The alternative is to keep the 3D space system, but apply a post-processing shader to, as you suggest, "fisheye" the entire globe onto the screen at once. This means that units near the edge of the view aren't just distorted, but incredibly distorted. Even with something like a Lambert azimuthal projection, a unit standing on the opposite side of the globe from your present position would occupy the entire rim around your view. The distortion would be ridiculous, when a single horribly distorted scamper can occupy most of the player's screen. It would be quite simply impossible to tell what was going on aside from a small area in the center of the screen. This would negate the fundamental premise of the idea which is to make the goings on of the other side of the planet clear and understandable.

Furthermore, this induces significant rendering issues. In a sensible engine, you don't actually render the full geometry of things which aren't visible. This means that PA can get a very significant optimisation boost by not fully rendering things on the other side of the world. With unwrapping, not only do they need to be rendered, they need to be rendered AND have a post processing, dynamically player adjusted shader effect applied to them. I'm no expert on these things, but it's a safe bet that this would lead to a massive performance hit.

By contrast, a mini-map doesn't distort the actual position of the units, only the mini-map's representation of them. Pretty much the same way that making a map of the world doesn't lead to the actual planet earth distorting. Unless it's a voodoo map. There would still be issues, in that a dot representing a unit at the edge of the map would experience large changes in minimap position for small changes in actual position. If units dodge and kite around it would be quite confusing how their signatures seem to jump all-around the edge of the map.

I'm sorry, but a full unwrap of the actual physical gamespace does not seem to be possible from a purely objective standpoint. A minimap is possible, but i would personally (in this case subjectively) find it less than ideal. I would reserve the implementation of a minimap only in the event that all markers, concurrent views, alerts and other ideas have been tested and found insufficient.

Quoting this because I feel a lot of people want minimaps or spherical unwrapping without considering that we've barely tried ANYTHING to improve Awareness on a planet aside from the Zoom so far and that there are a lot of things that can be tried before we fall back onto Minimaps.

Mike

Because alerts are so much better than a minimap ... Gonna love the bip bip

Way to needlessly polarize it. It's not about any one particular feature being better than another particular feature. It's about using a selection of features to remove the need for for a Minimap, which as already explained is not ideal due to the spherical nature of the map to begin with.

I mean, who knows how it'll play out once we're able to open multiple view ports, or have camera hotkeys and a whole bunch more things to boot.

Mike

A gentleman and a scholar.

Also, why are you so prejudiced against audio alerts (pilot, not knight)? I'd rather have a klaxon blaring through my speakers and keep a group of tanks than loose that group of tanks. It's annoying, yes, but it most likely will not be a blaring klaxon and I would much rather keep the tanks nevertheless.

what if the minimap was a rotatable sphere that you can click drag to turn it? a few people thought of the but everyone ignored it and went back to Strategic zoom this and Flat Minimap that. Both are not ideal for a sphere! you must have small MINI SPHERE, (aka a miniature map) for it is most ideal for our current situation.
(this is only the map navi possible solution)

you could have a defcon series for each planet. defcon 5 for no enemy units sighted. 4 for small group sighted, 3 for small group attacking or large group sighted, 2 large group attacking or nuke silo/ rocket gantry detected, 1 nuke/ K.E.W. incoming.
(planetary danger indicator)