What is with this obsession with huge game worlds? For something like a raceing/flying game...I can sorta understand...but a RPG where you are running around on foot? A RPG where you run off in one direction for 10 real minutes just to find some NPC guy who tells you to go back and "talk to his cousin"...so you turn around and run for another 10 real minutes...20 minutes of the players life wasted because of some anal retentive insistance on "realisam"...and this is considered "fun"?

Instead of concentraiting on huge nearly endless worlds...why not work on new and innovative ways to populate the game world with interesting and fun things for the player to do?

Raloth consider your map.. if you are one the top row of whatever units you are you using on a grid of say 25000x25000 units, then you are technically pretty damn close to the ''northpole'' but on a globe how long does it take you to walk around the northpole in a circle?

If you are 3'' away from a tangible pole sticking out of santas backyard, it would take you about 2 seconds. You''d only be moving a few feet around it.

On your grid though, you''d still have to walk across the full 25,000 units. Which is the same if you were walking around the earth at the equator.

See the problem now?

~Vendayan

quote: Original post by Iron Chef Carnage
I don''t think I''ve ever seen a truly spherical world portrayed in a video game. Can anyone come up with an example?

Dark Reign 2 had a spherical world, but you could only traverse part of it, it was possible to see the entire world, though, through the editor

"How is wraparound on all edges/corners of the map not a sphere?"
Because walking past the north pole doesn''t cause you to arrive at the south pole.

in order to acuretly portray a sphere you need some tricky math, for one thing the east west distance gets smaller the further you get from the equator. As well as when you walk over the north pole you on the opposite side of the planet not at the opposite. So if you walked over the pole at the 0 degrees longatiude you would be 180 degrees longatudge.

its all very confusing and hard to portray.

dividing the world into a grid would look more like this.      2   1111111100000000000000   AAAAAAAA      Bbut here is the tough part if the screen is a 3x3 grid  the user would see this:at the north pole:  111 121 111 at the equator111  000AAAone south of the equator would look something like this000AAAABA

just imagine the hours of fun you could spend designing the algorithim that portrays that correctly in game as well as fun of desgining the map based on that.




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Writer, Programer, Cook, I''m a Jack of all Trades
Current Design project
Chaos Factor Design Document

Ah, I see now. So much for wraparound .

MSW: I'm not so much obsessed with large worlds as lots of detail. My game-units are relatively small compared to the characters so it will take a lot more to render the same "area". I only referred to "larger" worlds as compared to very small worlds, not just as normal large worlds. I'm more interested in giving the impression that they are large.

[edited by - Raloth on November 11, 2003 5:23:06 PM]

quote: Original post by TechnoGoth
"How is wraparound on all edges/corners of the map not a sphere?"
Because walking past the north pole doesn''t cause you to arrive at the south pole.

in order to acuretly portray a sphere you need some tricky math, for one thing the east west distance gets smaller the further you get from the equator. As well as when you walk over the north pole you on the opposite side of the planet not at the opposite. So if you walked over the pole at the 0 degrees longatiude you would be 180 degrees longatudge.

its all very confusing and hard to portray.

What if the map were laid out as a cube? Provided that it''s large enough, the player wouldn''t likely be able to tell the difference between that and a true sphere. There would still be some tiling issues at the corners of the cube, when the world is flattened out, of course... That could either be dealt with by mapping the world onto a sphere (rendering just a patch of the whole at a time), or by making the corners inaccessible.

It could work provided you don''t use cardinal directions. Since on a sphere you can walk north from any point and arrive at the north pole.

A cube shaped map would really consist of 6 smaller maps with their edges connected to another map. But in the end the user will notice that the world is a grid rather then a sphere.

But unless your going for a high level of accuracy its usual not worth the trouble of creating a sphere map, espically since the user will most like not even appriceate or notice that fact.

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Writer, Programer, Cook, I''m a Jack of all Trades
Current Design project
Chaos Factor Design Document

Hmm... What are the mathematical problems of making a spherical world? I mean, imagine that you just used a colossal sphere, so big that it would be impossible to perceive the curve of it. If you did that, and made it mostly fractal, with the "map inserts" concept I described above, you could conceivably make a full planet. If you went far enough in one direction, you''d wind up at your starting point, but nobody would be able to do that without some serious spaceship action anyway.

The "world" in which all the action takes place would not be any bigger than your map-making requires, but if you need to just keep running, you can. And it lends itself to transportation issues as well. You have to take a train to someplace that''s a thousand miles away. Sure, you can TRY to walk it, and if you are all kinds of badass and take lots of food, you might even make it, but it would take a couple of weeks. I''m thinking here of a desert planet, like in Dune or Trigun, but if you wanted to, I don''t see what''s preventing climatic zones. Since the fractal will handle generic areas, and the individual maps can have any theme you want, it''s entirely possible to have multiple "styles" on a single planet.


If it''s space-oriented, this would work especially well with uninhabitable planets. You could have biosphere colonies scattered about the planet, and uninhabitable waste everywhere else.

The thing that would kill this is if it''s tough to actually MAKE a gigantic, fractally-terrained sphere. If you can produce it with 2MB worth of algorithm and use it, then why not? But if it buggers your representation of space or hurts the use of gravity, then screw it.

Really, I''m just imagining a world in which you can orbit a planet while shooting at a fixture or even a moving target on its surface. That would rock. You wouldn''t even have to be actively rendering the planet''s surface, with cities and whatnot. Just throw the fractal onto the sphere as a texture/bumpmap, and let "sensors" pick out targets Star Trek-style. Little JPEGs could be imposed over the fractal to show large mapped features, and an atmosphere would be simple enough to concoct. At this point I''ve entirely lost track of the topic at hand, and am enjoying some top-notch pipe dreams. I''ll be quiet now.

NOTE: Bear in mind that I have no idea what the capabilities or limitations of fractal-generated terrain are. I know a little bit about how fractals are used in creating texture maps, and that''s the idea I''m running with. Just a huge bump map for the planet, that has real 3D depth to it. Like a big spherical Bryce terrain.

quote: Original post by Raloth
What should I do when the player gets to the end of a world? On larger Earth-like worlds I planned on just having an endless ocean. On very small worlds (asteroid size) I was going to have it wrap around on all edges so that the world actually feels tiny. I''m stuck on what to do for something like Mars. Obviously I can''t really do an ocean. Any ideas?

If it''s a sci fi story, then possibly your player is interacting with some sort of alien technology at some point in the gameplay as perhaps part of a puzzle or key or method of game advancement progress solution of some sort, and you could easily use the same technique at the ends of the world where one of the effects of interacting with the technology acts as a gate to bring the player back to where they should be (or not, if you want to say ''don''t be looking here'' without words to the player) to continue level advancement.

There were all sorts of "throwback" devices from a lot of famous games, but I think the purpose here is to bring a player back to earth, because exploring is fun, but endless exploring would be not so fun I think.

One of the devices I use is magical, where you can explore all you want, but, there''s no guarantee you will find anything, except occasional powerups (you can bury some fun or nasty boss things, but how many of them satisfy the player? Probably only a few.) and you can simply invoke the ability to return to your last completed task.

HTH,

Addy

How about using an icosahedron?? (Did I spell it correctly?)

20 triangles, each with their own map (hard to do tile based on a triangle though).