Non-spherical (I don't mean flat) planets

This probably sounds like a silly question but:

I'm just wondering since the planet generator is underway...Could we make planets that are like cubes or other polyhedrons for kicks? Or really lumpy planets or oblongs? Or is it pretty much limited to spheres?

If not, how hard would it be for a modder to do that?

I don't know about hard edged shapes, but "lumpy" shapes are all but confirmed from the initial teaser with the asteroids.

I seem to remember from somewhere that they will consider non-spherical map architecture in the future.

Personally, I'd love to see a Klein Bottle and other crazy surfaces.

I wonder how unit movement would go on hard edges (how does one travel across a cube?) but it sounds very interesting to see happen. They'd probably need slopes at the intersections but otherwise sounds like fun.

If I recall correctly Klein bottle are only viable in 4 dimensions. I doubt that PA will support 4-dimensional coordinates.

What about a planet that is in the shape of a Cube? Simple huh?
Since we can have mountains and different heights it would propably be easy to make planet in the shape of a cube unless there is a maximum and minimum height of elevation.

What about dyson ring/spheres? Units fight on the inside, and everything falls up. That's gotta be pretty confusing.

neutrino has stated that they're building the engine as versatile as possible. He's also said it's not a goal to implement different shapes before the initial release.

Which is exactly why I suggested it. Something that emulates how its surfaces connect to each other may be able to be simulated in 3D. And would be an utter mindfuck to play on.

A möbius strip would be a fun 3 dimensional equivalent.

My thought when I suggested this was that you could have a ring with all the units on the inside like the eponymous halo from Halo. I didn't put it in the OP because I felt it was asking too much...but I see a lot of other people thinking along the same lines so there you go.

Basically this was one of the potential features that caused me to go in the design direction that I did for the planet generation. Originally it was going to be a flat topology mapped onto a torus that looked like a sphere. There were a few issues with that but the biggest one is that it restricted the topology. Now we basically treat planets like an arbitrary 3D mesh. Of course, as I've said before, we are currently concentrating on spheres which means some aspects of what we do might need to be changed before implementing other shapes (in particular the camera, but we'll see about that as we get further along).

4D topology isn't supported and the generated mesh has to be manifold. Sorry about that

I'd love to see ringworlds and O'Niell cylinders, personally.

I'm so glad you moved away from that idea. It's one thing making a great game, but I think it's really admirable that you guys are considering the after market impact of the decisions you are making so much too.

One of the driving factors in a lot of what we are doing is future proofing and modding. If I could ignore both of those the engineering problems would be substantially simpler in many ways.

It would be easy to just say no and say that things like this are not going to be possible, and I am really glad that you and the people at Uber are not taking the easy way out in situations like this. Accounting for what people want to do with modding and ensuring the game is flexable enough to handle all of these possibilities cannot be an easy task (not to mention all the extra work involved after the fact).

That's why I respect what you guys are doing so much. I'm sure I don't speak for myself alone. It's a good job that you're all so passionate and dedicated about making this game as good as it can be! Those are two big components that will go a long way to making PA a true successor to it's forefathers and are worth every bit of hard work.

Our trust and monies are in safe hands it seems. Hat's off to you, sir!

*faints with joy*

I'm sceptical with regards to arbitrary formed planets because I can not think of a good way to get an overview over what happens on the whole planet. Even on a spherical one, that's a real interface design challenge.

When you have a map with multiple planets and each planet is a sphere, how do you give the player a good overview over what happens?

One of the strengths of SupCom was that when you zoom out all the way, you can see everything. You get a complete overview. Even in TA, you had the mini map for this.

I can not imagine how something like this could be implemented with real spheres (or even more complex shapes). Please enlighten me!

You could color in the planets at max zoom to show who controls what territory via the energy and mass deposits?

Giving you an overview of the amount of a particular world you control resource wise.

I think that looking at a solar system in its entirety should be considered differently to the tactical view in SupCom.

The tactical view of the battlefield is akin to SupCom when we are looking at one side of the planet and whatever is happening there. Having another side to the planet is an extension of this and zooming out further to see the solar system is an order of magnitude larger. I don’t think it is necessarily realistic to expect the capacity to view every unit’s precise position and status on that large a scale.

For a solar system view I would expect to have something akin to the empire tree in Sins of a Solar Empire as shown in this image:
http://www.stardock.com/brad/sins/img28.jpg


This way the player gets information about the state of their forces and the state of enemy forces within sensor range on a planet by planet status. They can also see what facilities they currently have, letting the player select facilities on various planets without having to go to the planet in order to do so.

The point is at that kind of scale you should be presented with an overview of all controlled territories. If the player then wants more detail in terms of specific positions and managing their movements, it should perhaps necessitate the player to jump to planet scale view to get the SupCom level of unit management.

Another thought I have had, maybe it should be possible to get a condensed image of all current sensor data of a planet when you select it in solar system view. Something like the map in Planetside:

http://www.entertainmentfuse.com/images ... %20Map.jpg


Being able to apply filters for territory control, current enemy activity (as far as your current intelligence suggests) and current hotspots could be quite useful. Or maybe those should just be filters that can be applied when looking at planet scale view.

Finally it has been said that PA is going to allow the player to have multiple windows open in order to show different information. One thing I could see happening is having two docked windows set to show two views of whatever planet is currently selected in the main window. Have them set to show both sides of the planet. So you can see what is happening on both sides simultaneously. Anyway I am sure these aren’t perfect ideas but I’m just throwing ideas around to discuss, thoughts?