Globe variants

[moriarty]

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

[Volutar]

Recently found this funny image. It reminded me xcom2 How they decided to make inverted earth and change its colors, while missing one issue - submarines shouldn't be able to move over land Though they often do that in game.

[Leflair]

But Land-Subs are the best subs! They got tracks and everything 

[Yankes]

I made small experiment with globe graphics, now you can have longitude & latitude lines on it

[Volutar]

Yeah, but this realization suffers from scale issue. lat&lon lines better to have 1px width, while these are zoom and latitude dependant (near to pole -> narower longitude lines, less zoom - more holes, more zoom - too thick).

[Francois424]

Personally I prefer my globe to be without the bars.  Just feels better that way.  That being said, if it's toggettable, who am I to say 


PS: As long as you guys don't mess with my Antarctica, you're safe 

[Yankes]

Yeah, but this realization suffers from scale issue. lat&lon lines better to have 1px width, while these are zoom and latitude dependant (near to pole -> narower longitude lines, less zoom - more holes, more zoom - too thick).

I can easy fix zoom dependency by simply drawing thinner lines when camera i zoomed.
Latitude is probably unfixable without any ugly hacks.
But this have one great property, it will work in any globe projection
I made some test with this.
N and S are north and south poles. Globe surface is heavy deformed but lat&lon lines and shading is still working.

[Yankes]

Next experiments.
This time texturing

I created big bitmap (to have good quality at max zoom it have 2k x 2k size) in memory and I draw some random shapes on it.
After that I projected it on globe surface.
Funny thing its run with similar speed to polygon implementation. Only drawback is that it need lot of memory (around 8MiB this is around 1/5 of current usage of OX).
Right now its print colors directly, but I think adding second pass to apply correct texturing from today globe. 

[SupSuper]

Are you reinventing 3D-accelerated rendering?

[Yankes]

Yes, why I should learn OpenGL if I can write my own render?

[luke83]

I have know idea what your doing but as long as your happy , i am happy

[Yankes]

Next stage of my fun with globe texturing
Now I used standard texture cords. On second and third screen shot you can see random pixels of bitmap that is projected on globe. This bitmap have 1k x 1k size. 2 last screen shots show different globe projection (4th screen look very similar to original bitmap).

Downside of this is I need made 2 calls to `acos()` per pixel, this isnt cheap. But now I can easy modify globe surface, sink continents or creating craters that will be permanent.

Only thing left to do is apply standard xcom textures on my globe version, I cant use it directly on bitmap because different zoom lvl and nonlinear projection will make it ugly. Solution is store in bitmap only texture offset that will be used to determine what color will be on final pixel.

[Yankes]

I can now draw any surface I want on globe
Creating Vegetation map will be only problem of converting this graphic to format that is loadable by OpenXcom.

[luke83]

Thats awesome 

[Volutar]

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.