Xenogears Worldmap projected onto a sphere

[Micky]

This is something I've been playing around with since the weekend:
Screenshot
It is a projection of the worldmap from Xenogears onto a spherical mesh. I've been thinking for ages how it would be to have an actual round world, instead of a flat world that wraps around from the north pole to the south pole.
I originally thought I'd have to use some magic preprocessing to avoid distorting the map beyond recognition, but this is a simple spherical projection and it looks OK I think. The only thing that looks a bit messy is one of the islands near the pole. Maybe I'll add a special case for that. A cylindrical projection didn't look as good, though.
The next thing to look into is remeshing of the map to use less triangles in flat areas, and some LOD stuff so you can zoom in and walk around in a 3rd person view. And there are of course loads of graphical effects to add.
But this is actually faster than the old flat rendering code, because I resampled the textures for the new mesh. This safes state changes and improves triangulation.

(Mods note: Feel free to move this into the last Xenogears Worldmap thread. I wanted to avoid necromancy.)

[Cyberman]

This is something I've been playing around with since the weekend:
Screenshot
It is a projection of the worldmap from Xenogears onto a spherical mesh. I've been thinking for ages how it would be to have an actual round world, instead of a flat world that wraps around from the north pole to the south pole.
I originally thought I'd have to use some magic preprocessing to avoid distorting the map beyond recognition, but this is a simple spherical projection and it looks OK I think. The only thing that looks a bit messy is one of the islands near the pole. Maybe I'll add a special case for that. A cylindrical projection didn't look as good, though.
The next thing to look into is remeshing of the map to use less triangles in flat areas, and some LOD stuff so you can zoom in and walk around in a 3rd person view. And there are of course loads of graphical effects to add.
But this is actually faster than the old flat rendering code, because I resampled the textures for the new mesh. This safes state changes and improves triangulation.

(Mods note: Feel free to move this into the last Xenogears Worldmap thread. I wanted to avoid necromancy.)

Well razing the dead is fun..

Anyhow the highest mountain ranges are 6.7 to 7km high and the earths diamter is roughly 12800km.  Somehow those mountains look disproportionate (even if it's a small planet ). 1800:1 ratio there in any case (roughly), unless of course you don't want it too look realistic then I spose it's cool (grin).  Good job, if you find the model of the flying variant of Bart's battleship you could have some fun flying that about.  I suppose you could do the same for that city too

Cyb

[Micky]

Anyhow the highest mountain ranges are 6.7 to 7km high and the earths diamter is roughly 12800km.  Somehow those mountains look disproportionate (even if it's a small planet ). 1800:1 ratio there in any case (roughly), unless of course you don't want it too look realistic then I spose it's cool (grin).  Good job, if you find the model of the flying variant of Bart's battleship you could have some fun flying that about.  I suppose you could do the same for that city too

I'm not going for realistic, and in the screenshot I wanted to emphasise the bumpyness of the world. Otherwise it would look like I just mapped the texture to a sphere, which takes about a minute in Maya.
In the end I'll see what works well , relative to character size and walking speed. Maybe I'll use a different mountain scale for space views and walk-around views or something.
Akari already found the models for the worldmap objects in one of the archives, so it would be just a matter of extracting them.

[Cyberman]

I'm not going for realistic, and in the screenshot I wanted to emphasise the bumpyness of the world. Otherwise it would look like I just mapped the texture to a sphere, which takes about a minute in Maya.
[/qoute] Never tried it but ...

In the end I'll see what works well , relative to character size and walking speed. Maybe I'll use a different mountain scale for space views and walk-around views or something.
Akari already found the models for the worldmap objects in one of the archives, so it would be just a matter of extracting them.

Oi I was semi joking however I believe they made the WM stick out as much as they did for the same reasons you made yours, visability.
It's really hard to see the features if they are to scale.

Cyb

[Micky]

Oi I was semi joking however I believe they made the WM stick out as much as they did for the same reasons you made yours, visability.
It's really hard to see the features if they are to scale.

You did have a point, though. I've been thinking about that while writing the code.