<disclaimer>
a) I know this is bordering on necroing a thread
b) I
am happy with the current globe as it is
c) I remember all the troubles and hardships the team went through in creating the current working globe
d) I am aware that some of this touches work that has in more-or-less great parts been done by a member who has since fallen away for several reasons
</disclaimer>
that being said, does anybody think it would be possible to allow for a more flexible globe? I think that "regions" (as in almost-but-not-quite-countries) are still hardcoded, right? as is the general topology of the globe. for several reasons (including but not limited to TFTD/UFO combined play) it would be nice to have a little more flexibility. I'm not sure if there is an easy or even at-all-possible way of achieving this with the current system... any of the programming specialists have an idea?
@Warboy: I don't know the background story of your "war" mod, but in my mind I always see it as a less covert and more open-war game, where the alien invasion has truly started, with world war III being fought across the globe, playing ground missions to "capture" or "defend" countries, expanding your territory, like in the good old days of "Dune" and "Command & Conquer" (or, even more basic,
Risk). for this, of course, you would need dynamically changing territories... and I could see several interesting uses of dynamically-changing topology, too (alien-triggered asteroid impact, global sea levels rising due to T'leth activities...)
the way I see it, there are three options:
1) we keep the current system, although unhardcoded and more easily accessible: a big list defines triangles by three freely-placed corner points and assigns each triangle a "terrain". regions are defined somewhere else
2) we expand on this system, increasing the number of triangles, each triangle has a "terrain" and a "region" (and possibly a few other properties like "owner", "impassable by unit of type x", "value" (for funding), whatever you can think of). I don't know how high the number of tris can be before the game starts lagging terribly, but if this is added in an openGL kind of way, you can probably go pretty high. of course, setting up the globe would be terribly inconvenient unless there is some kind of easy editor which allows you to "paint" properties onto the globe, adding them to the tris where applicable
3) we throw everything away and change it to a bitmap that is wrapped around a 3D sphere. the bitmap uses pre-defined color coding, which is translated into "terrain" in-game. regions are either defined as before, or with a
second bitmap, adding the future possibility of allowing the game to change the bitmap
4) ...? I don't know. I'm not a programmer - I don't know about hardware use of the different approaches...
