Planets: square or spherical?

I was purposefully vague because it's not finished yet. In fact I may have already changed my mind on the topology thing. Mainly this would be because I want to support more possible features that keep popping up here.

Gah! I saw your red name on my thread, and got all excited for whatever answer you were going to give.

Now I have to wait longer?

What a dirty Tease!

What's Next? You'll will start Neither Confirming or Denying everything? ;p

Mike

Add a stretchgoal, near the end, that covers "making planets not suck"

We all know EA would.

I am going to start being more vague on stuff because the game is going to be built over time. I think the current list of features is a good starting point and I'm not going to promise a lot more until we get further down the track. The feedback on this stuff has already changed a lot of things just in the last week.

D:

At least you've given us fore-warning on the deliberate vagueness.

In spore, once the game enter into the multi-planets stage, the most rts elements fade away and the player can only controls a single ship, I think Will Wright might has some good reasons to design the game like that.

If PA decide to use spherical map, then perhaps the developers could give each planet two minimaps, one for the front and one for the back, but I highly doubt that could be intuitive, and they might occupy too much space in the screen.

In Eskill Steenbergs Love, the world appears spherical but is actually a cube net (ie 6 squares in the shape of a crucifix) mapped to a sphere, so the squares are distorted near the poles. For that game, it doesn't matter. For this, it probably does.

It is of course mathematically impossible to neatly map a square to a sphere.

They're probably too far along to change it now but I don't see what's wrong with an actual spherical map.

It all depends on how it looks from orbit, which matters because of asteroid strike targeting.

It would be nice to see a dev diary video explain this by showing how it works, if it is that far along.

Unfinalised is good. More time for you to be convinced to make the planets spherical. Squares are really weird once they interact orbital mechanics which like to pretend that the planet is a sphere.

Just make sure that when you zoom out you really can see anything. It would be problematic, if some things are hidden away at the back of some planets.
I dont care if you do that with some kind of projection or with square-maps.

The main problem about multiple spherical playgrounds is visibility, it is hard to know what is happening on the other planets or the back side of the planet without proper minimaps, and just give some warnings like "enemy is attacking your units on planet Temblor" is not informative.

I think minimap of a spherical playground could work like this, it shows unit dots or icons on the back side in a semitransparent way, and if you middle click on the minimap, the camera would transfer to the back side of where you click.
Maybe the main gameplay screen should have this too when the player zoom out, so the player can see everything.
And there could be a way to select units on the back side without the need of camera transfer, the implement could be spacebar+mouse click, it should be able to select targets on the back side for attack commands as well.

Awesome

... I say that a lot, but I mean it.

I disagree. Have you ever tried flattening the surface of a sphere? It'd look terrible, especially when there'd be interplanetary combat/movement. Also, how would the view stretch around to connect the 2 ends? You'd have units just disappearing on one side, appearing on the other instantly. Looks really bad and hard to play.

What I though they could do is just make the interface so that there is the main view, and a space minimap.

The player would 'select' a planet/asteroid/body to view, and it would center on the main screen. Then, just like in 'Google Earth', you would move your view around the planet. By selecting different bodies, you could move your screen around. PA will have no space combat, so there would be no need to have a view that isn't centered on a solar system body.

The space minimap could be some 3D depiction of the solar system, which could be rotated. Large icons could indicate planets, perhaps coloured to show the current players on it (green for friendly, grey for uninhabited, red for enemy, yellow for shared, flashing for current ongoing combat).

EDIT: Having a transparent planet might work, but it'd still be very difficult to play and interpret. You'd have so much clutter on the screen with overlapping units on both sides of the planet.

I think if the view was centered on a planet, asteriod, space ship etc. there wouldnt be any problems. Its the same in sins of a solar empire which works perfectly.

A solar system level minimap would be useless, units' icons or dots would be too far away and crowded together, thus not informative.
I think it would be better to have a rank of minimaps for every planets, if that occupy too much space in UI, then diminish them and let the player decide which one should be enlarged.

I don't think the whole planet should be transparent, I think the units on the back side should be visible in the form of semitransparent dots or icons in minimaps or zoomed out camera, the players should be able to distinguish them from the units on the front side easily.

Sins of a solar empire is actually a RTS with a single flat playground, the players don't need to care about back sides in it.

Do you mean flat, as in having all the planets and things have only 1 side, or flat as in the solar system is flat? I'd be very, very disappointed if you could only play on one side of a planet/moon/etc.

A flat solar system makes sense though. Would simplify how the solar system is made, and navigation between things.

Also, it wouldn't hurt to have multiple ways to view the game. If you were replying to my post, I only mentioned planet indicators, showing every unit would be ridiculous. If there was space, there could be group icons (so large groups of air units would have one large air unit icon, iirc similar to SupCom2?). It wouldn't be useless, it would offer an easy way to see what was happening on every planet without actually needing to look at it, all in a single map. Separate maps for every planet/body would be useful as well, though like you say, much more cluttered if all open at the same time and harder to use.

Some UI just for navigating between maps/bodies would be helpful. A solar system zoomed out view. Click on a planet to jump to it. Perhaps zooming out far enough could change to the solar system view, like how SupCom had the strategic view (with grouped icons to reduce clutter).

It's really a lose-lose, though. Managing planets where part of them is always going to be hidden would be a pain, but squares cause weird things to happen when mapped to spheres.

There's no real good way to do it, but I honestly think that just having square maps is the lesser of two evils. It prioritizes information over potential weirdness, weirdness that with enough time could probably be coded around.

If you zoom out you ABSOLUTELY need to be able to see everything. Thats the whole point of the zoom. maybe just show half transparent symbols for units that are on the other side of the planet. Might get crowded, though, so I think projecting the surface to some kind of flat form when zoomed out over the whole solar system would be very useful. If you zoom in on a specific planet it can change to show the sphere.

EDIT:

That feature was super annoying, I was very happy when I saw that you could turn it of.
Just show everything, many symbols on top of each other converge to a big blob, too.

Add a poll? Be nice to see the general opinion.

I suppose:
Square would generally be the idea that gameplay occurs on a flat surface
Spherical would be it occurs on a round surface.

People can interpret its implementation themselves, since there are far too many ideas to all have in the poll.

The only important thing is that you can zoom out and see everything. Thats just the whole point of the zoom.
Apart from that I think that it would be better to show a flat surface at all times.
Just far easier to handle.