Possible mod request to consider for the future, a different solar system mode. @chargrove might need to see this for unique hooks. Instead of planets orbiting a sun, we have concentric discs of landmasses. The discs would touch, but orbit around the center at different speeds and direction. The rings could vary in width. The rings could vary in "biome type". The rings could vary in land/water ratio. The rings could vary in elevation (ramps and plateaus). Example: Ring #1 - Stationary Ring #2 - Normal, Clockwise, 10 m/s Ring #3 - Wide, Counter-clockwise, 15 m/s Ring #4 - Narrow and fast, Counter-clock 35 m/s Ring #5 - Normal, Clockwise, 20 m/s Possible scenarios: 1. Players all spawn equally spaced on the outer ring. 2. Team 1 spawns outer, Team 2 spawns inner. The general meta for these could vary greatly based on where the highest concentration of metal is located. Example: - All players battle inwards for more metal? - Metal is concentrated on fast disc, concentrations become real targets that will spin around to you in 3 minutes. This could make for very interesting plays on how to coordinate land, naval, air and orbital assets. In fact, they don't even need to be discs, We could have conveyors that are apart and meet up only in certain parts. Like this... From a layman's perspective, the hardest part of this mod might be getting a unit from Ring #1 to Ring #2.
I guess it will be possible to remove the sun from the system. It will probably also be possible to use a different starting shape then a sphere, so you can start with a donut shape or something flatter. It will probably be possible to set the orbiting speed of the 'planets' to zero, so that they are stationary and it will probably be possible to set every planet at the origin of the solar system, so that you have the configuration that you want. I'm pretty sure you can set the rotation speed of planets. What would probably be hard or impossible to do, is move units easily from one disc to the other, because they would be threated as different planets, and some things could go wrong with them being so close together. Having the planets generating interesting geometry as well, would probably also be very hard to do, so this would work better as a custom map with a mod installed, and not as something that can be easily generated. All just speculation though.
I think a hack of some sort for metal planets was discussed where each hemisphere of the planet rotated in opposite directions, with only one of them having mass and applying/receiving gravity while the other is parented to the one with gravitation. Bridges between the hemispheres would occasionally line up, allowing units to cross. Your idea is pretty unique to that though. I'd be glad to do the models for this biome, and I think the math for geometry bending will also have to be modified.
Perhaps even we could have players be able to build halo/ring worlds like this dynamically.. that would be cool.
I wonder if this would require going back to a traditional RTS orthographic camera? I think @garat is Uber's camera ideas guy?
You could do it with a pole-locked camera. Orthographic cameras would result in bad things happening in a system with multiple planets. Most modern RTSes aren't *actually* orthographic because there are really no advantages to taking ortho over perspective aside from maybe a negligible bump in performance. Edit: Oh wait, you mean traditional traditional RTSes. Eh, my comment stands, Perspective is almost always superior to ortho.
Another hard part is that the camera will still need to track per "disc-ring". I am really interested in how Uber built the new true strategic zoom camera. Like at which point does it un-sticky itself from the planet and become stationary (relative to the sun). How it's built could determine how moddable this can be.
