How many people would like the 2D version included?

I would like to see some method of viewing 2d maps of the planet in PA. It's important to be able to have a good view of everything that's going on on the map, which was why strategic zoom was implemented in the first place. How it's implemented and what mapping method they use will require experimentation, but it would be an important game feature nonetheless.

I misunderstood the original thread author. I thought he meant including a way to play games like you did in older RTSes, with a flat, square map.

I did not mean imparting that restriction on all players in all games. I did not realize he meant projecting the entire spherical map of a planet onto a 2d plane, which I understand is quite difficult to do properly.

A way the goal of the OP could be done would be similar to that of Sins of a Solar Empire. Any planet around which you have units fills up 2 bars as you get more units (one bar for war units, one bar for buildings), allowing you to see at a glance how many units you have. Enemies have their own 2 bars.

With strategic zoom, do we even need a minimap? Your minimap could simply be another window where you keep the planet zoomed out. Want to see what's up on another pole? click and spin. I know in the past sc1 had a minimap but honestly I just turned it off so I'd have more space, and just used strategic zoom. I'm sure theres a few people out there who don't want to lose the classic minimap, but when seeing the entire map at once is as easy as clicking and spinning I honestly believe it's a waste of time to try to project the worlds at all. The end results are just as distorted as any one view you'd have by using the strategic zoom, and you'd only gain what was being occluded, which again becomes irrelevant when you just spin the map.

More on topic, there should not be a 2d version of this game available at all. The point of this game is awesome planetary battles. If you want to play a game that's on a 2d map go play zero-k or TA or SC1. The reason this game will be so awesome is it completely ditches the traditional approach to "2d game map" and that is why it gained so much attention.

The reason to have some sort of 2d projection is for situational awareness. In Supcom, the minimap wasn't completely necessary because most of the time the player was zoomed out anyway. However, I do know a few players who spent their time playing zoomed in, and zooming out was an exception. For these players, a minimap provided the situational awareness they needed.

The same goes for PA, except now there's no way to get an always-on view of everything that's going on. Now there are about 3 perspectives you would have to look at the planet from in order to get the full picture. So if you have units attacking an enemy base on one side and are coordinating another attack on the opposite side, you may not see when the enemy brings in a load of reinforcements and signal your retreat in time.

Sure it would be handy to have a hotkey that rotates the planet by thirds instantly for you, but then you get into the fact that this is a multi-planet game. How are you going to be able to keep tabs on what's going on on multiple worlds? It would sure be cumbersome to jump to each planet and do rotations every couple of seconds. (Reminds me of Starcraft . . .) Instead, if you had those planets being shown in projection mode, you wouldn't even need to switch windows to get an idea of when a situation is changing. When it's time to focus your efforts on a planet, then you could pop it back into 3d mode.

Remember, the implementation doesn't need to be perfect perspectivewise, as this is only used for situational awareness. So the implementation doesn't need to be anything complex.

youre thinking what then, a constantly rotating 3d spherical minimap projection of all planets?, just for a situational awareness thing?, and use a stategic level zoom as well? that could work

Nah, it doesn't need to be anything fancy. Just something like a flat map laid down, with pips for the units. No rotation needed. Just a Mercator projection, like someone posted earlier. It's not proportional, but it gets the idea across. And when you see something of interest, you can quickly switch to the 3d spherical view. Whether it's used as a minimap, or a separate window, or whatever, is up to the player. As long as the player is able to tell, at a glance, what is going on.

That is not going to be possible at all.

While there are projections which are at least equal area (but not equal distance!) for pure spheres, things tend to get much more complex with the flexibility the planet system is supposed to have. For now it looks like it's already going to be a complex terrain which is mapped onto an almost freely shaped body, real spheres being only ONE possible option.

Not all of those body's surfaces can be mapped onto a 2D surface without massive distortion, some can't even be mapped to 2D at all! One possible example being the Möbius strip if you allow units to traverse over the edges (well, actually the "only edge").

Yet nothing stops you from playing in "classic 2D" after all, just play a map where all planets are just planes floating in space, maybe even a single planet only.

Please stop saying that all the time, because it's not true.

Any mesh based object can be unwrapped and mapped to a flat plane. Convex meshes are ideal, but any mesh with a uniform surface will work fine. In our case, we don't necessarily need to render the mesh heights, we only need to use them to define the texturing, since this is a procedural environment. Now the challenge is to make it look pretty. For regularly shaped planets and asteroids, this shouldn't be a problem, we'd just have to deal with perspective issues at the poles. For more complex shapes, they would require some smoothing, but in extreme cases you may end up with just a really oddly shaped map.

Now the challenge is indicating unit locations on this unwrapped map. Most likely the object has a center, so developing an equation to remap their x/y coordinates to a flat plane based on the object center is fairly trivial. And if it follows the algorithm used to unwrap the mesh, the resulting coordinates would be correct.

And thus, you have a fairly decent flat projection. It's not going to be sound based on perspective, but I assure you that it's a lot easier to get a quick overview from this map than it is if it were left entirely to the 3d realm.

true, it'll be distorted a bit and you'll have to remember that up and down are connected as well as left and right and the paths between them are not as simple as might be depicted on a flat plane

Well, not necessarily up and down, since they'd just cross over to the opposite point on the same side. But right and left, yes.

yea, sry, i wasnt real clear describing that

This is a very important fact.
Having a non equal distant mini map results in following strange behaviors:
- units at the poles look much more distant from each other than they actually are. they could be in attacking range, but the player wouldn't instinctively think they are.
- units appear to have different movement speeds, depending on their position. it would be very difficult to predict when a certain unit/army/whatever will reach its destination.

I admit I liked the mini map in supcom, didn't used it often, but it was nice to know it was there. However I see no projection which would give the player a quick overview about a planet without distortion, which in my opinion has to huge disadvantages, as mentioned above, to be useful.

We've discussed this all before, including a bunch of feedback from Neutrino.

Why does this thread exist?

perhaps because there are >1000 topics, search gives ~17000 results because ignoring '2d' and the confirmed-thread has either no answer or has a suboptimal structure.

Because if you read it, you'd know that the previos discussions were about the internal representation of the game world, while this is about the game map.

No, that thread covered a lot of the ground that this one is treading.

I think it was this thread:
viewtopic.php?f=61&t=34863
There are some good comments on the implementation of a minimap/2d view.

That's kinda stupid. How can you collapse sperical maps into a rectangle? You would have angles and lengths distorted around the poles. How would you manage units going out of a rectangular map? Would you have infinite scrolling? If yes, then special enginge would have to be writen that wants to match all the lengths and angles at the center of the screen, however the further from the center of the screen the more lenghts and angles would have to be distorted. Looking at such map would look like similar to looking at the real map with a lense that distorts simiralily to fisheye effect. Projection of a small planet onto rectangle would look like a disaster and would need special projection and length and angle correcting engine and its effects would have to be distorted anyway. Making your idea real would be a waste of time and money with really weird outcome.

Yes but geometry would be distorted too. Angles and lengths would be incorrect (they are incorrect anyway when you project 3D on 2D screen but they would be distorted even more). Finall effectw would look like looking at real map with toys on it with a a lense that does fisheye effect to what you see. I think that making such 2D equivalent is a waste of time and money and final outcome is going to be weird and not worth the investment into such idea.