Ok so I'm sure this is possible but crazy amounts of work.... I reckon. But I think it would be highly worth it. The idea is to join several pips so they create a flat map of the current planet. Over to you pip master @cptconumdrum.
interesting idea. id like a flat projection of a planet as minimap, although i think this is too much for a ui mod.
Doesn't seem like they are working on a flat map so if this works I see best mod ever at the other end. Yes even better than the Dino load screen mod. I don't need this to be a super fast 1 button mod and you have a map. But maybe press the flat map button. And it scrolls the screen and saves the pips and opens them over like 5 seconds. Plenty of time early game to do this.
"You have a comfortable pair of running shoes that you wear everywhere. You like coffee and enjoy the beatles. You think Robinson is the best-looking projection, hands-down." Good choice. XKCD hates me.
I can think about an approach to realize an Azimuthal equidistant projection. 1) you take the planet model. 2) you swap the outter surface with the inner surface (your map is still a sphere but you play inside the sphere not outside). 3) you place a camera in the middle of the sphere with a f.o.v. of 360°deg 4) you should see something like the picture I have no idea how to do that.
One of my plans for the globe on PA Stats is to utilize the 2D mode cesium supports. I already did one test, but without any texture it's really hard to read what is where.
No. Unless the api is updated to allow checking where units are I don't think it's possible, afaik the only thing you can do atm is see where things are created and destroyed.
Is it possible in JavaScript to get a bitmap of what Coherent renders in a PIP? In that case a mod could rotate the planet in the PIP, take snapshots of the picture at fixed intervals and transform them into a 2D projection of all sides of the planet.
I see - how many i7s would I have to string together to get a decent framerate while all that is going on, though?
I don't think we can do a projection of a holodeck like that. The best I could do would be two pips side-by-side that rotate together whenever you turn either one of them, so that one always shows the reverse side. @SXX was doing this from the system editor a while back. He was able to create rotating gifs of the planet. This kind of magic is way beyond me. I'm only the "pip master" because I've made a bunch of cheap little hacks that take advantage of the work Uber did.
As long as I get it's not possible, but I'm doing some experiments related to texture/model extraction. Unfortunately it's just video and it's working well for map preview, but Colin need something else to get textures. Also I'm personally met obvious problem of storage for GIF previews and if I'm actually make some service for previews it's will use video because it's will use 20-30 times less HDD space and bandwidth than GIFs.
Even though I have no idea how to integrate the gif with the 3d globe I am still pretty interested into those previews for PA Stats for a planet preview. I am currently looking for a better server and it looks like I might get a server that will offer quite a lot of storage space. So how much storages on avg does one image of a planet use as a gif? Or maybe there is a way to embed a video into a very simple player in html5 browser. How much storage does it take in that case? Also how fast is your generation if tuned and fully setup?
If file size is a problem, I'm sure that can be worked around. I would think it could be tuned to use less frames for the rotation, or even simply take a single frame and not rotate at all.
200x200 gif use about 1-1.3MB per planet while WebM 430x430 video use 50-60kb. 1MB is looks like small number, but long term it's a lot. I guess 3-5 days of work required. Though it's little off-topic so if you want details PM me. But from what I can say videos/screenshots it's not the best way for planet textures extraction, at least before Uber expose some advanced camera API so it's possible to get screenshots based on location.
@trialq is right I don't get that data from PA as of now and even if I could get it even "all positions of all units every 5s" would be a LOT of data to handle. Delay wise the base technology PA Stats uses basically can btw go down to the ping time between the PA client, the PA Server and your browser. So that can be less than 1s, if PA Stats had a monster of a server. Not sure we need a delay that small though. In most cases the current 5s cap is enough. To get back to showing units: I have the data of where units die. So I can show places of fights in the future.
yes please. I would love to be able to rotate the planet, examining the killing fields. maybe different icons for ground, naval, air, and orbital units as well as commanders and buildings. could the units from different army's also be different colors, so I could see how much each army suffered in the battle. make this a mod please!!!
