"Spherical" maps for planets, buckyball coordinate systems

http://www.mavorsrants.com/2013/02/plan ... ngine.html
Now, we've had the terrain engine blog post, so I'm not really asking about PA here, but could you have a game engine that used a buckyball as the model for its planet, and use different coordinate systems for each tile of the buckyball?

So you'd say "unit factory 1 is on hex #7 with rotation x and at hexagonal coordinates abc" or "gun turret 1 is on pent #4 with rotation x and at pentagonal coordinates defg". You could save movable units like that, but handle them during the game by treating them as physical vehicles driving over the surface of the buckyball and have gravity act towards the centre of the buckyball.

I guess you'd be limited to the surfaces of the faces, since digging down you'd intersect with the other tiles, but there we go.

I wish I could code. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

Re: "Spherical" maps for planets, buckyball coordinate syste

Such a system could be used to distribute workload between processes if needed.
But for actuall coordination its not very usefull imo. Because you still would need to translate from hex to hex or hex to pent etc.

I would just use spherical coordinates. Also now a days cpus have hardware pipelines for cos and sin so only one tick as for +.

Re: "Spherical" maps for planets, buckyball coordinate syste

Watch the livestream today where we go into some more detail on the nav system

Re: "Spherical" maps for planets, buckyball coordinate syste

wait what livestream

Re: "Spherical" maps for planets, buckyball coordinate syste

*squee*