Planets: square or spherical?

God, these minimap concepts are cluttered and confusing. I'd sooner do away with it altogether and simply support split-screening (which they said they're going to do).

Still? Were they ever 'locked into' anything other than the annihilation of planets?
Plus are you talking how it appears on-screen or the underlying topology.

Semi transparent spherical large scale maps and a local circular one when zoomed in will work fine.

It's not going to be possible to see the entire play area at once with multiple planets anyway.

Actual spheres will be much less confusing than torus-like wrapped square maps too.

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."

From the first page.

If it stays like that it's kind of a dealbreaker honestly. Much worse than the lack of a campaign.

Honestly, if it's just a warped rectangular battlefield I'm going to consider dropping my $115 pledge... It almost feels like a lie after watching the trailer. We should be able to utilize the whole planet, I don't want to be locked out by the poles. I wouldn't mind if the planet unwrapped when zooming out for a Sup-com like tactical view, (maybe as a separate option or button), but if the tech behind it actually limits it to be a visual illusion more than anything else I'll be heavily disappointed.

Here is an official response that is more recent than the Mavor quote above.

From the looks of it, I think things are going to turn out okay...

From the third page. So no, they're not locked into square planets.

I suppose some official statement (video?) with all that has changed might help clear some confusion. It's all over the place at the moment.

We are currently spending time looking at more spherical planet methods.

<3

Hope Uber can keep the topological trick thing supported in the engine, it has a cool lovecraftian feel in it, you know, looks like a sphere but behave like a rectangular. Might be useful if someone want to make a horror mod.

Even if they can't allow land units on the poles, simply being able to attack the opponent's base from both sides would be a revolution on its own.

I wonder if aircraft would be able to use the poles...

Thats quite possible on normal 2d maps already.

I've very happy that quadcubes may be used. The same technique is used in games such as Kerbal Space Program and Spore, and it is very interesting and powerful.

An interesting thing about them is that all the features (or lack thereof) of a wrapped rectangle could actually be imitated really well with this system, and also this system allows for a practically unlimited amount of procedural detail, with little work on the artist's behalf. The level of detail is so high you could even theoretically walk around as a person and experience no loss in detail. It could also allow for much bigger planet sizes; I know that they intended to have no hard set limits hardcoded anyways, but this could make the strain on GPU and memory much less as you only need to calculate and store what you are currently looking at. Everything else is loaded out of memory.

Seeing as how you pretty much always enjoy the protection of a corner, how do you figure?

I say, if you want a high level of detail and large worlds, they should use the Outerra engine. Man, that would be an epic battlefield!

But I think I'm ok with the implementation of that quadcube for generating and displaying a world. It looked great in the examples, and you wouldn't have to use quite as much detail as the article maker was unless you just really wanted to, or the players wanted to crank it up.

Even a base in the corner has 2 sides (left top case). Also on many maps you actually start in a position that forces you to build your base in a spot that can be attacked from multiple sides(bottom right case).

Uh, there's still map borders. Only on a spherical map can every player be equal distance from each other in every direction. The only possible way you could be open to attack from all sides on a 2D map is if you spawned right in the middle. It's impossible, otherwise, because while YOU might be in the middle, attacked from all sides, that means someone is on the edge, attacking you, and is NOT able to be attacked from all sides.

This is a lot different than just exploiting the map edge to fly some air units around. On a spherical map, with 'perfect' base placement, the enemy is equal distance from you, in every direction, always. This is not even close to even being REMOTELY similar to something as pedestrian as a flanking maneuver.

I just checked this video from outerra i must say iam impressed:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pA7s6oyl3vo

But i dont think they will use that engine they may use ideas from it through.

Yeah, I was just joking. Though if it continues to be worked on, I see good things in Outerra's future. It already works, as far as flying around the whole globe goes, and they're constantly adding stuff. There's a demo for it, I'd advise anyone who's remotely interested to try it out. Just make sure you have decent internet. It streams LOD in, as the actual full dataset is around 11Gigs or so.

Anyway, that's a bit off-topic. But I thought it was pretty easy to navigate around. It had a little google-maps minimap that allowed you to know where you were, even though it's the normal square projection...

Maybe this isn't so off-topic? It has a true spherical map, a free-form camera, and a Mercator projection minimap (though it zooms in the closer you are to the planet). I'd say people should mess around in it, as it has all the main problems put forth in this thread all in one. But it's not impossible or even hard to get around. And with a few adjustments for RTS play (lock camera to planet when zoomed in, non-auto-zooming minimap) it would be pretty dang good.

That would be same as spore, and it was pretty unhandy to get around in that game for some people, so I still keep doubt to it, it seems the requirement for a render engine demo and a rts is not same.