A New, 3D Interface

[The Mad Viking]

The problem is that every tile must be identical for terrain and unit gif mapping to work.

Geodetic domes are made of subtly varied triangles and cannot do this.

OK, here's how it could work.

You start with an icocehedron. No, its not what happens to your head after drinking too much. Its a 21 sided prismatic solid in the general shape of a sphere, formed entirely of equilateral triangles. (This is the shape of those big funny dice in D&D)

You map onto each triangle as many hex-tiles as you want. Because hex tiles form a perfect equilateral triangle, excepting that the three "lines" aren't perfectly straight.

These triangles would be mini-maps in themselves. To get a good size globe you would have about 240 hexes along one side of the triangle. This would give you about 10000 tiles, like a 80 x125 grid.

You would have 21 selectable views, which you could scroll between. Each would be straight "down" onto one "triangle, with a slightly oblique but very legible view of the six adjacent triangles. You could easily rotate your view in any of 3 directions, and quickly scroll around to the opposite side or the globe.

At the interface between two triangles, you would have only prependicular movement from your "own" triangle across the interface to the corresponding hex on the other triangle. Some graphical work here, but the geometry works.

Not as spherical as anyone would like, but lets you have correct movement, and send an ICBM over the ice cap if you want.

BTW, I don't believe there is such thing as a computer map without "tiles." Call them points or co-ordinates, they act as tiles. They are all mathematically defined relational space. Some programs just conceal them better than others. To try to emulate a gridless world at all you would need a ten by ten sub-coordinate system for each current civ "tile" - 1,000,000 points for your computer to track. For what?

Is what I'm trying to say at all understandable?
[This message has been edited by The Mad Viking (edited March 23, 2000).]

[Adm.Naismith]

Sound interesting, but you lost me somewhere on the visualization part (it's almost midnight here and I have a bad cold, so my brain is not at full steam).

Anyone with a picture to help me visualize the idea?

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Adm.Naismith AKA mcostant

[Curumbor Elendil]

I like the concept of a spherical world; in fact, I was going to post something about it here but then I saw this thread. It would require an alteration of some game concepts, if we were to have a true sphere without squares or other polygons.

Movement points could be expressed in terms of miles or kilometers along the surface.

City radii would actually be just that, radii of perfect circles.

Resources would be continuous, rather than discrete. For example, a city could have 28239.9 hectares of forest, 1000293.6 hectares of grassland, and so on. Production of food and units and improvements would rely on a function translating hectares of these resources into grain storage and construction capacity. This function could actually be estimated by running regressions of population and economic growth on various climactic and geographical conditions of world regions. This would ensure realism. It would be very complex, to be sure, but given that turn-based strategy isn't very demanding on computer systems anyway, surely we can afford this kind of detail and complexity. We're not talking about a 3-D accelerated action game like Descent 3.

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Curumbor Elendil
jason.sorens@yale.edu
ICQ 56126989

[This message has been edited by Curumbor Elendil (edited March 22, 2000).]
[This message has been edited by Curumbor Elendil (edited March 22, 2000).]

[Curumbor Elendil]

Yes, it seems as if the number of points should recede toward the poles. Now, what would be the problem with making each point equivalent to a pixel on the computer screen? That would be very precise, pretty much avoiding the problems associated with making a near-sphere out of polygons, and would also seem to solve the problem of distances toward the poles. To my simple understanding of it, anyway.

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Curumbor Elendil
jason.sorens@yale.edu
ICQ 56126989

[The Mad Viking]

CE, good ideas.

If we use a sphere, all terrain boundaries would be defined by coordinates. You would need at least 3 coords to define a region on the surface of your sphere, which the computer could then calculate the area of. Good thing it could, because I couldn't!

Units and cities locations would have to be defined by a point (a centre-point if you will) on the surface of the sphere.

You still must define an minimum increment for your units in order for the logic to work. (e.g. for the computer to know that two things are in the same location)

Movement would have to be iterative for a TBS game, that is, you click on a location and it tells you how much of your movement point allowance it would take before you commit to the move. I say this because having missiles fall short or planes run out of fuel takes the fun out of the game. For that matter, I want to know if a ground unit can get to a city in the current turn or not to plan my strategy.

How do you define the relationship between multiple points on the surface of a sphere? Latititude and longitude are comprehensible to us, but are awkward models for calculation the distance between two points, because the distance between two lines of longitude vary as your latitude changes. Calculations can be done on distance, but you still end up with as many points (possible locations) circling the north pole one degree south of it as you do along the equator. So you have 360 points about a mile apart located 70 miles south of the north pole, and 360 points 70 miles apart along the equator.

Now I'm really curious as to how the coordinate based games on spheres do this!

[Gord McLeod]

quote: Originally posted by The Mad Viking on 03-23-2000 12:54 PM Now I'm really curious as to how the coordinate based games on spheres do this!

Populous didn't worry about it. There were no north/south poles on the planets you played on, or at least, there was no difference in climate to indicate the poles. No equatorial bands, no ice caps.