Planets: square or spherical?

Strategic Zoom as seen in SupCom worked well with SupCom because the field was already rectangular and it wasn't going anywhere. The same can't be said of Planetary Annihilation. Planetary Annihilation has planets. I understand the importance of seeing everything in a game like this, and I wouldn't resent some kind of toggle feature or mod or whatever that did that, but when I zoom all the way out to a solar system scale, I am not thinking "wouldn't it be cool to see a bunch of rectangular projections of all these spherical battlefields?" When I zoom out to a solar system scale, I am telling the computer "show me ALL THE PLANETS!" Not seeing planets when I zoom out would make the game less awesome for me. Trying to get a god's-eye view of two planets crashing into each other and instead being shown two rectangles on a collision course would make the game significantly less awesome for me. Planets need to at least look like planets, or one of this game's coolest features will become a lot less cool.

Hmm yeah I didn't think about smashing planets into each other. For that we really need 3d spheres to make it look awesome.
Meh. I like the Idea of playing on 3d spheres, but the more I think about it, the more I realize why there aren't many games that do it. I just cant think of a good way to display it...

I guess the next best idea is to display units on the back half transparent or something like that.
But that will look very crowded if you have a base on each side of the planet.

The more I think about it, the more I think it would not be that bad to go with spheres, but only allow you to use the visible side. It is just too much of a burden to the player to actually scroll around the planet for EACH planet of the solarsystem.

I trust the guys at Uber to make it work well, though. Just shoot for awesome, not for realism.
If real spheres are just impossible to deal with, they should not be in the game. If they find a way to make it work with spheres, well I dont mind ;D

Ok wanted to do this for some time allready:

Just have faith, Uber wants to make it the best way they can, they told us, they were going to test it and choose the best option they can find. I hope they have use of the research and philosophy in this topic.

my ideas:

1. We need spherical planets, everything else would suck imho.

2. We need good overview.

3. The advantage, users with multiple screens have, shouldnt be too great, hence all information should also be shown in a single screen if zoomed out.

4. Use real strategig icons. SupCom 2 had a feature like that, you might remember, even if it was introduced quite poorly. A huge unit bulk would be controllable with one click.

Now think about this system a little more. Think about Hearts of Iron for example. Think about real militaristic maps.


What if we zoom out, it would be possible (toggled on or off) to see an overview, actually in 3d, where the backgrounds of planets would be viewable greyed out or transparent. Now armies and bases would be replaced by icons. But instead of showing only a number like in Supreme Commander 2, these icons would show the good player much more information. there could be information as if there is Anti Air, artillery or an expermintal within that army (with symbols and numbers) there could be an symbol that indicates strength of this army and health.

By double click on the icon, you would zoom immediately in on that army (or base), on the correct side view of the planet. This would make navigating much easier. You zoom out, can view the whole solar system. Now to go anywhere you dont have to scroll or pan or what ever, you just double click a unit or base to zoom there. Same could be done to mass/metal spots so you can find them more quickly.

ANother thought that should be brought in, as all of you want total control and perfect view of everything going on, you have to think about, all disadvantages a spherical system might bring for that: All players experience the same. So if you cant see properly what is going on on the back side of a planet, your opponent wont either.


Im fully supporting spheres, and I think there will be found a lot of ways to make them possible and to make playing on them possible.

I reckon there should be a way to work the game with spheres.

How about a system where both the whole solar system and individual planets are rotatable by click and drag. Obviously planets would also need to have a "real" orientation to the sun and other planets, but the view could be set back to the real orientation by pressing/holding a hotkey or something.

Works, but requires lots of clicking and dragging by the player to see information. The intention with minimaps/etc is for all the information to be available at the same time.

It's a difficult problem. lol.

Yeah it is difficult (or maybe just new?) but must be solvable. So long as planets could be spun around fast/with good control I don't think it would take too long to get used to to spinning round to one side, making a few orders, then spinning round to the other side to make some more.

Combined with some sort of planetary minimap e.g. the 2 halves projection or perhaps a transparent gridded sphere, plus hotkeys to select units or buildings that aren't in view, this wouldn't be any more difficult than managing a large battlefield in any RTS.

The ability to avoid fast jumps with hotkeys is one of the big things the clearly separates TA/SupCom from games like SC2, where you have to jump around all the time.
Would be sad if PA had to resort to SC2-like controls.

Why can't you just make the mini-map a sphere as well? Then you don't have to worry about all this wrapping of squares and cylinders around a sphere. The mini map would just center around wherever the camera was situated, but you would still be able to click-drag the mini-map to see the other side of the planet. Double clicking somewhere on the mini-map would make the planet in your real time camera shift around to that location.

I was thinking along these lines too... if you represented the planet as a semi-transparent wire mesh hologram and used size/shading to make it obvious which side of the planet unit icons were on, you could probably get a pretty decent view of the whole planet.

I have thought that too, but if your planet's current orientation is not real, and enemy is using a cannon on another planet to launch units to your planet, or a asteroid is heading towards your base, how should that be displayed?

The UI design for minimaps might be a bit problematic.
If the UI only display the minimap of the planet which the player's camera is currently looking at, then the player won't be able to know what is happening on the other planets simultaneity.
If the UI display all planets' minimaps, then it have to spare enough space for the maximum amount of minimaps which depends on the the maximum amount of planets that could appear in a game, if each minimap is composed of two hemispheres, it would be 2x of the space.
Of course the developers can make the minimaps diminishable, and only allow the player to enlarge one of them, but if they are too small when diminished, they would be very uninformative for the most of time, especially for the large planets, after all, even a normal size minimap could be quite uninformative for really big playgrounds, like 81x81 maps in SupCom.

Maybe toggling the opacity of planets could work? Would it be easier to work with a sphere if you could make it transparent or a wire mesh or something?

And someone else back in this thread mentioned having a single button that flips your view to the other side of the planet. No matter which visualization is eventually decided on, I think that would be a good idea.

A minimap that only shows you half of the information available on a map defeats the whole purpose of a minimap.

And moons and possibly asteroids. You could easily end up with minimaps the size of a desktop icon going with that route.

And, of course, we'll need a minimap of the whole system, since planets, moons and asteroids are not merely different playing fields. It's important to know if someone's sending an interplanetary strike force or a moon in your direction.

why are you discussing minimaps. I never used them in SupCom, why would you when you can zoom out and find everything much faster?

Because you won't be able to do that with a whole solar system. If you zoom out you'll be looking at just one side of some entire planets. If you rotate the solar system you'll be looking at another side of the planets, but some will be in the way of each other. That's the root of the problem.

At least one minimap would be necessary.

This game is looking like a good reason to invest in multiple monitors, holographic projectors etc.

the zoomed out view of supcom is basically a big minimap.

So... What if the minimap showed the opposite of what the main screen shows? I suppose there could be various toggleable modi; one that would show a true minimap of the whole map of the side you're seeing, another minimap that would show the opposite, a view of whatever you're currently viewing, but then the opposite... There may be some more useful modi I can't think of now.

Hmm, why not make a 'flexible' minimap; you can enlargen it or move it however you want, simply like you'd change the size of a folder on your PC.

But yeah, the zoom is handier than a minimap I guess.

Also, what about manually designating zones, and having voice-based alert systems if enemies are spotted in a zone? You could have predefined zones covering a whole planet, a whole asteroid, et cetera too I guess.

But I would rather see objects on the backside transparently or in grey or as smaller symbols than use a minimap I think^^

I supposed the way I imagined it would be when you are zoomed in far enough, it was displayed very 2-D and rectangular and as you zoomed out, it would reach the point where the program would wrap it around the planet (the rectangular maps that didnt quite act like planets quote that was hinted awhile back).

If anyone has ever used the universe sandbox from steam, once you get out to solar system mode, I would think that style of navigation would be easiest. You double click on the celestial body you want and it will auto zoom you to center the body on your screen. At that zoom range, you can click and drag the planet around in order to get a view of the entire planetary battle and then zoom in (back to the rectangular map) to the section you want to view.

Now, I am just imagining this, I have no idea what their engine is capable of supporting.

A collection and polishing of my ideas:

1.About the camera, I think the camera angle in the game should be always parallel to a local axis, for example, if the camera is on a planet, then the upper edge of the view should persistently face the planet's north pole, and the bottom should persistently face its south pole, but if the camera got across one of the poles, then its binding to the poles should be inverted.

The solar system as a whole should have its own axis too, and all the axes should be parallel to each other.

There should be a certain key or button that could turn the camera upside down at any time, the player could use that as a adjustment.

Just like in SupCom, holding the middle mouse button or something else should be able to drag the camera. This would be very handy for a axis based camera.

I believe this is better than a free camera with a adjustment key. Cause the angle of it would only changes in limited situations, and the way it changes is monotonous, so it would be less confusing than a free camera and the players wouldn't need to adjust the camera frequently to find something.

2.About getting information, I think minimaps are not needed, but when the player zoomed out, the units on the back sides should be shown as faded icons (or maybe darkened icons like what bgolus said, or a combination of both), some people might think this would make the playgrounds looks too crowded, but I think it would only be crowded if there are two groups of units happen to be overlapping in the player's camera angle, and I don't think that would looks worse than a group of gunships staying above your base in SupCom.

And the terrains on the back sides might should be shown as faded Contour lines or faded meshes too, some special terrains such like water could have a different color for this kind of manifestation. I'm not totally sure about this, maybe just show the units on the back sides is enough.

Holding or press a certain key should make the terrains and units on the front sides faded and unclickable, and make things on the back sides clickable and not faded.
And there should be another key that send the camera to the back side, the exact destination of the camera would be depends on the mouse pointer's position.

Sounds are important information sources in the most rts games, so if the most sounds can't travel between planets in PA, there should be some extra warnings about enemies, maybe more detailed than "your units on the planet capella are under attack".

edited Aug 28, 2012 4:15 pm

I don't like viewing the units on the back side of the planet through the planet. I prefer displaying the opposite side of the planet on the minimap because then you are able to see everything when zoomed out and directions do not reverse (they do when you look through the planet).

Camera movement around the rotation sounds cumbersome when trying to work at the poles. I wouldn't want to limit your capabilities at the poles so I prefer a free camera.