Latitude & Longitude Overlay

I propose that there be an overlay option that displays a latitude/longitude grid on the planet's surface. Maybe the grid only shows up at strategic zoom level, or perhaps it is visible any time the overlay is enabled, but I believe that affording the player with a sense of orientation and distance would be a nice addition. Not only that, but if coordinating attacks with an ally it would be supremely useful to be able to give a set of concrete coordinates instead of "their base is between the ocean swirl and mountain range." Maybe it could look something like this (albeit not made in Gimp by a complete editing novice):



Also, It may be nice to have the planetary sphere bisected by the ecliptic plane to further aid in orientation.

I've waited to bring this up up until after seeing the in-game livestream to make sure this idea still made sense after seeing the way the planet moved and rotated. Granted, the camera and UI are not final by any means, but as they are I personally still get lost.

This is something I've been thinking about as well lately, I'd like to see it as an overlay, maybe not quite as many divisions as shown here, at least for smaller planets.

Mike

I have one word to say:

"Quadrants".

That is all.

@Knight That is one of the problems with a non-resizeable overlay when dealing with planets of varying dimensions. On larger planets, a 20 degree or 30 degree incremented overlay would be too open and would need to be brought down to 15 or 10 degrees. However, on a smaller planet 10 degrees would be incredibly cluttered looking, and the overlay would lose much of its usefulness.

A dynamic overlay that changes based on planet radius could work, however someone might want more increments than another person. For this planet size I chose 15 degrees because it seemed like a nice balance between too many divisions and not enough divisions. Also, I briefly experimented with having buildings being drawn on top or below the grid, and on top is the more aesthetically pleasing option imo.

@Nanolathe Agreed, but you still need a way to map quadrants to a sphere, so why not skip the middleman? I think saying "center of his base is -30, 45" is much easier and articulate than "quadrant 243" or something like that.

0°, 90°, 180°, 270° lines and the Equator for Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere.

Dividing the Northern and Southern Hemispheres into 4 sections (or 'quad')

Really? I think you underestimate the scale planets can get. The planet they showed is "1/4 of the way up on the planet scale slider." On a planet much bigger than this one, even hemisphere quads would be much too large to coordinate an effective attack. A lat/long system allows for short, articulate descriptions of locations on a sphere of any size.

Except it becomes overly "busy" at smaller scales. You need a Hemisphere divided into Four at most for an asteroid... maybe up to 12 or 16 for the biggest spheres.

Agreed, that is why I suggested a dynamically resizing overlay a few posts ago.

I disagree. A large sphere divided into 16 parts does not provide enough detail to articulate a position easily. As soon as you divide any further you create too many sectors to keep track of. Numbering sectors in any ordered pattern causes numbers that are not sequential to be adjacent to one another. Without constant referencing of which sectors go where, it is easy to get lost. When referencing a lat/long system, if you say "135, 60" it is easy to have in your mind exactly where that is in reference to the origin, so it is easy to triangulate where that is in reference to any other point.

tl;dr: As I see it, the best method would be a lat/long system for anything larger than an asteroid, as a sector system has too many problems and inconsistencies for a full scale reference system.

given the flexibility of the UI system Uber's been making, I bet there will be a lot of experimentation and modding, and down the line we'll be able to toggle layers of detail for stuff like this.

I think it would be great to have keyboard hotkeys linked to different data layers. Interesting graphical visualization of game data was the one thing SimCity got right ..... on the other hand Neutrino was talking about designing the units and buildings themselves to convey information based on their look by design anyway so I may be getting carried away here lol

Also, a hotkey for snapping the camera back to a 'baseline' orientation parallel with the equator... So that we can rotate the camera any which way, but quickly reorient it to a constistant default angle.

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Could just have several toggles for lat/long overlays with varyingly sized increments, that way you can just use the right one for the particular planet, and/or drill down to very precise coords if you so wish. Or could have that as an extra option, and just have it display the most appropriately scaled one by default (if have a variety could very easily apply a correct one filtering by planetary radius).

Additionally, I would love it if when you hover your mouse over a building/unit it gives you the lat/long of it, especially for waypoints, could have very accurate coordination then. Again, it needn't be default but I would love that kind of thing.

Fully agreed. The more uses the reference system has the better. It would be really great to be able to Hotkey+click on a point to insert the coordinates to a team chat window. Then clicking on the "hotlink" in the chat window could put down a indicator on the planet surface.

So many possibilities!

I think this should be a toggle option.

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I don't understand. You want a system that tell you your mouse coordinate, so you can give it to you allies?
Why not simply use marker and draw on the map?

Better idea

Draw on the map or mark where the enemies base is is better then describing it

Or send a button to your allies gui that takes them to look at where the base is

A planet's poles make an excellent point of reference and IMO should almost always be visible.

Okay yeah I maybe shot that idea off half-baked.

Still, I think that lat/long should be available to be used. It just makes sense.