Globe variants

[Yankes]

the problem not in vegitation map, but in openxcom. it uses 8bit graphics and 320x200 mode, and any of these "image spheric mapping" are useless excercises. you're reinventing a bike, yankes.

8bit isnt problem its only limitation. I cant do any color blending or color interpolation but at least I can made that my globe look exactly like current one but without limitation of polygons, my solution allow removing polygons form game complicity, even testing crash site type can be made by my bitmap.
One thing that is easy in that approach is add city arenas on map on that ufo can crash (after you shutdown terror ufo in last moment) and at night will be more bright than surrounding arena.

[moriarty]

hmmm, I can see where your approach will have some applications, but the current model also uses the polygons to determine the terrain type for the crash sites... how do you want to implement that if your globe is a single texture?

now if you for example use two bitmaps, one "visible" image for display and one "invisible" image that color-codes the terrain types, that would be something... larger urban areas could be implemented, urban sprawl anyone? that would also enable us to change the terrain in-game by "re-painting" areas... of course the images would have to be included in the saved games.

[Yankes]

yes, but I will stick only one with terrain type. This is because I would need couple of texture for every zoom level if I want use image directly.
It will be 2 stage coloring, first define what terrain type this pixel have and next determine what color it should have.
Another problem that Volutar pointed out "image spheric mapping" can have problems on spheres poles, its hard to made good looking textures, especially when Im limited to 8bit and cant filter it out, but again I will use terrain type that is very uniform near poles and I dont need use any filtering because I will always get same results (at least in standard globes).

And about modifying and saving globe, yes its one of goals why I do it.

[Volutar]

So the goal is more like terraforming (i prefer to treat it as "painting". I'd suggest to wait until very post 1.0 (or 2.0), when opengl engine will be used (IF it will be used). Globe texturing and "painting" with opengl is rather easy task, and can be multilayered without colour flaw (overlays in 8bit are almost impossible).
Yes it is possible to make it within 8bit paletted, in 320x200, with software render, but it really don't worth it. It will look pretty ugly and will become much slower, if you try to get higher resolution.

[Yankes]

Im now near finishing it. Right now only problem is poles because when I draw triangle on flat surface and then project it on globe all lines are curved.
But this isnt unfixable, I need only find new way of drawing this triangles (not 2D -> 3D but something like 3D -> 2D -> 3D).

[Hobbes]

I made some test. I used code from my radar range test, I didnt change lot of code (even position is same as on my last radar screen shot )
I have only question, did it look good enough as snow?

Yankes, have you done anymore work on adding seasons? Sometime ago there was an idea discussed on irc with Warboy of using the current system to place items on maps to be able to also place fire/smoke on chosen maps, which could be used to add fog, and it would be possible to add rain or other weather elements as terrain to the battlescape. Then rain could be set to reduce mobility for units or visibility for all units, etc.

And while looking at the images of the globe with the 'snow' textures (I created similar ones for the Taiga/Tundra northern regions) I remembered that seasons are caused by Earth's tilt of its axis, which would be something really nice to add since it would mean summer missions in the Arctic/Antarctic would always be on daylight, etc. But, then you'd need some sort of weather system.

[Yankes]

No, but because I now have OXCE I could recycle some ideas from that.

And if I add this to my branch, it would be hard to add whether effect to work like fire/smoke because it would break compatibility with OXC. Its because map data is save as binary and any new data would made impossible to read back. Only way I see possible to add this as "global" parameter. This could work without using any hacks.

[Dioxine]

Poisonous gases on a volcanic/postnuclear terrain... vacuum on Mars... fire & lightning & incoming off-map shells randomly killing things... yeah, we definitely need weather effects!

[beng]

okay, I re-edited. this is more accurate, free of false lakes as far as I can see, and features larger Alps, added Pyrenees as well as a greener Egypt.

while searching for good image files, I stumbled upon NASA's NEO project which has a lot of interesting image data, including bathymetric imaging of the world oceans, in high enough resolution, for free... the perfect source for geoscape editing

Great work @volutar and @moriarty !  A suggestion for further updates: add more islands to the large open sea areas so UFOs have more places to land in the oceans and players have more places to put bases for better radar coverage. For example:

• French Southern and Antarctic lands in the southern Indian Ocean
• Mauritius
• South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands
• Galapagos islands
• Samoa
• Cape Verde

[beng]

Here, I have used volutar's world.dat editor to add more islands to the seas. Also tweaked some textures to increase terrain variety.
Update: Tweaked the world dat to add a couple more islands and change some textures.  More places for radar bases in large ocean areas.
Update: Newer version in mod form in the next post below.

[beng]

I have made some more changes, added islands like Wake Island, Soccotra, Canary Islands, added more cities in most regions of the world so Aliens might terror attack more places (not sure if they will use them in game, like how do they decide where to terror mission?), and packaged it as a mod: Globe Islands. 

Works in OpenXcom 1.0 dev nightly and OpenXcom Extended 7.9.8 [2023-07-03] running in Linux Mint.

Note: To try this mod, start a new game. If you load saved games that were started without this mod the aliens may be using some of the old regions and waypoints.

Version Notes:

Version 0.2b: Changed country areas (used for UFO / XCOM activity calculation) to be slightly more accurate. Added alien mission areas for new Pacific islands.

Update 12 Aug 2023: Ver 0.3b - fixed region rules so UFOs should spawn missions in the new ocean areas and land on the new islands. Added a few more cities. Also adjusted country rectangles to include British, French, and US overseas territories like Guam, Hawaii, Falklands, French Guyana etc.