Planets: square or spherical?

I haven't heard any definitive statement that planets are one or the other. The chatter is leaning towards conventional square maps for planets, but I could be (pleasantly) mistaken.

Could someone explain to me 1) which way is it, and 2) why is it that way? Is it a technical or gameplay reason why one was chosen over the other?

so far I understood it that the final game will somewhat look like the gameplay vizualisation, which would mean planets are spheres. or what is your exact question?

From memory they were going with spherical planets but they would behave in a square manner so as not to confuse players. My reading of that would that a plannet would be a kind of warped cylinder, there is always an up and a down and the top is thiner than the middle.

Thats just my reading though.

I read that too somewhere. It hasn't been elaborated on as to what that means yet though. I'm very curious about this.

That's the impression that I've been getting, but I wanted to get the final word from Uber.

Honestly though, I've wanted an actual spherical RTS for ages now. It changes so much by doing so little. Players can no longer hide in corners and use the magical black map border as an artificial barrier.

Compared to rectangles; cylinder shaped maps would be better, circles even more so.

"With three-dimensional planets, with planets being spheres, are you worried at all about people getting disoriented as they move around these maps?

Mavor: Yeah, actually. So what we’re doing in this game, the actual topology of these planets is not what it appears to be. I don’t know if I want to say much more than that, but the actual flow of them, as you move around them, is much more like a rectangular wrapping battlefield than it is like an actual round planet. It looks like a planet, but it’s not necessarily going to act like one."

well the top of the cylinder wraps around as well... its just keeps the map having a top and a bottom. that top and the botton though are all essentialy unreachable because they are a single point on a polygon.

I dont quite understand this quote, what he means to say with it.

if it just looks like a sphere, but is rectangular, will this mean units will need the same time to go one round around the planet at the same latitude at the equator and near the polar region? or will this things be adjusted?

I imagine the map itself will be seen by the engine as flat, and then projected onto a sphere.

There are a lot of different ways to do it, see here for more reading.

It sounds like they are planning square maps similar to Moonbase Commander. In that game going off the mini map would cause you to wrap to the same point on the other side of the map. With manual movement you could keep panning up/down or left/right and it would eventually bring you right back to where you started. It wasn't hard to get used to movement wise but there was a learning curve in thinking about firing artillery or defending from all sides.

Which is too bad, with Homeworld style controls it shouldn't be that hard rotating around a sphere. It would definitely make asteroid impacts cooler if it was like in the video rather than transitioning to a flat map.

The problem is, you can't map a square map to a sphere without warping the terrain / space near the edges.

BUT if you leave out the poles, it might even be one of these "close enough" things.

I made a video of Populous demonstrating that it uses a wrapped square and I think this is what the devs mean by wrapped square. Hopefully that should clear things up as there seem to be a lot of misconceptions about what many people mean by wrapped square. Of course the devs might have meant something completely different but the Populous method is the easiest I can think of.

Given the above system I think it would be more accurate to say that the map is flat and drawn as a sphere.

I would like PA to use a real sphere because square wrapping is really really weird. I really doubt there is a smooth mapping from a wrapped square to a sphere. How would things that interact with or land on the planet even work?

Say you have an asteroid in orbit around the planet. Surely the point of the planet that it is above is quite important. But now there are a few conflicting problems.

• If they can only orbit around the equator then there is a large part of the planet that they never pass over.
• If orbits are arbitrary (which is my preference) then diagonal orbits are sqrt(2) times longer than orthogonal orbits. Additionally non-diagonal and non-orthogonal orbits will tend to creep up the square and end up covering the entire map.

This strangeness extends to the ground as well. There would be longer and shorter straight routes to a point on the opposite side of the planet. Even the notion of opposite side is weird so I'm defining it as the point with the longest shortest path to reach.

Tossing up between square planets and planets with edges on them I definitely want square planets. The devs would just have to be very creative with their patches to make it all work out reasonably well. Of course spherical planets is even better.

Well maybe it can be just as easy as doing it this way

Square map

Alt.


Sphere map


And with some button or zoom setting switch between these two views.

satch3l, the method of map visualisation is only part of the issue. The larger issue is the underlying topology of the map and part of that is thinking about how it can be visualised.

The minimaps might be very important for a rts game with multiple playgrounds, you need to know what is happening on all playgrounds completely and simultaneouly.
And a squre minimap is much more intuitive than a anamorphic mercator projection like minimap, the latter is almost unavoidable if the map is truely spherical.

but how lame is it, if you fight on planets and they dont actually feel like planets?
if I fight on a planet I want to cross it in every direction and I want it to be equidistant in all directions. I would like if Uber would really think about that very well, maybe they can come up with a good idea.

galaxy366 bought up Spore in the other thread. That is a good example of actually spherical planets and Spore has some sort of planet wide RTS mode too. Something like that would be really good.

Not having played any of Spore past the first stage (as a microbe), I don't know how it worked.

Can anyone enlighten me, and the other forum members who are unfamiliar with it?

I played Populous heaps, but never realised how wierd the mapping was until I saw that vide :?

galaxy366 here

Here is a video by IGN talking about the Civilization Stage of Spore. This is the RTS mode.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gee8m-grZSs

As you can see the world is a true sphere, no fake illusions.

I didn't realise Populous was square until it came up either. But then again Populous didn't have anything that made it obvious like command drawing.

Spore isn't square, I just checked a few videos on youtube taken while in space mode. There was an RTS stage of spore that wasn't much but it was there.