quote:
Originally posted by Darkknight on 03-04-2001 03:48 PM
I've been looking at the Pentagon tiles idea and I'm confused on how your going to put it together is it going to look like a sphere or will it be flat? Because when it is stretched out flat there are spaces between some tiles where they don't join together.
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The problem does not lie with the flat map. These can be made with both square and hexagon tiles. Basing the map on the carbon-fullerene structure would work, but it has two inherent problems that I can immediately (there may be more which I am missing) perceive:
1) The buckminster fullerene structure contains both hexagons and pentagons. This would mean that the map would have to have both of these types of tiles, which would be hell for AI pathfinding. This would be on top of the fact that AI pathfinding would already be severly hampered by the curvature of the surface requiring the use of polar rather than cartesian coordinates.
2) Geometry dictates that even a combined hexagon/pentagon structure can only be used to create certain specific sizes of "spheres". The minimum size of the map would have to have exactly 60 vertexes (easier to measure map size by vertexes rather than tiles under this system), no more and no less. Similar restrictions would apply to maps of other sizes. There simply cannot be sizes in between these - geometrically it just does not work.
Suggested Solution:
If you are going to use a spherical map, don't use the structure of carbon-fullerene as your model. I suggest you abandon the entire idea of tiles alltogether and instead fully rely on polar coordinates for assigning locations. Each coordinate would have strings of information attached to it regarding the terrain values. There could then be a skin superimposed on the surface of the virtual sphere depicting terrain. The colour of each pixel would then be dependent on the terrain value of the corresponding coordinate. Alternatively each pixel would not need an assigned coordinate. The pixels between coordinates could be blended in automatically with a gradual colour transfer between two pixels that have their own coordinates.
. I can be of assistance in any political/tactical aspects of the game (I am a 20 yr Army verteran) and whould love the chance of testing the different aspects of the game, while maintaining the neccessary documentation/paper trail of course. 
