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Hi,

I am working on a geo-political sim-style game, which will take place on Earth. I want to create either a map or a globe, and have 3d features like the mountains jutting out. How do I do this?

My game will feature a large zoom range, from seeing the whole map/globe, to being zoomed in on individual regions. For this reason, satellite pictures alone will not do, since they don't look great at high zoom.

My idea was to have the game read where lakes, rivers, etc are, and have some sort of map generated using my own graphics, so rivers can have flowing water for example. Only problem is, I'm not really sure how.

Any tips on any/all of these things would be much appreciated!

Cheers.

If you ever hope to do this you better be prepared to spend years (lots of years) on it. The VIS and LOD systems needed alone will take an entire team to create and handle that many polys plus zooming. Not to mention it will load extremely slow in sections (you will have to load it in sections as the entire globe will take up so much memory nothing will be able to handle it). Good luck.

Learn some super-duper modeling skills.






p.s. yes, i just said "super-duper"

Or comprimise. If the game is good in concept, then feel free to cut back on the graphics. Sid Meyer's Civilization is an excelent example of great-game w/ cheesy-graphics (okay - not all will agee it's a great game, but it has sold quite well).

If you accept compromise, I'd suggest going with a flat map divided into sections. Then when you "zoom in", don't worry about it being a smooth zoom-in. Simply cut to the zoom-in map.

As far as the river and water coolness, I'd say cut back on those. A simple water texture scrolled across a plain (or whatever object) will get the idea across.

Great graphics enhance a game, but they have never made a game - but a great game can be great without great graphics.

Thanks for the encouragement RiiDii. I have decided just to use basic graphics, since they can always be improved later.

Can anyone point me in the right direction with making such a game, since there aren't really tutorials on it. I mean how do you make a scrollable tile-based world?

Just another idea:
If you've ever played Star wars Battlefront when you start any game it begins looking at a huge world, then zooms in to a continent, then a region, then even more to a city. How did they do this without lagging it up?

Firstly, this was a 3d picture, not a model, but you could probably still get the affect going.
They just zoomed in really fast to the area they wanted to see, then quickly switched to a detailed picture. It looked as if it zoomed into a detailed picture sinceit went fairly fast. (When I say fast I meanlike 1 or 2 seconds at the most of zooming). They kept doing this for each zoom.

If you wanted to use a 3d model for this, I'd suggest having the farthest zoom of earth the model, and the rest pictures. Then just check what continent the user is looking at when they zoom in, and zoom in on the right picture for that continent.

Kind of confusing I guess the way I wrote it but I think I got the idea across...Just go play SWBF and you'll see what I mean.

That's a very good idea Ruccus! The only problem is, at closer zoom, it would quite annoying if you were looking at your own country (say, France), and then you wanted to scroll along and take a look at another country (lets say Israel). Since Israel is just outside of Europe, wouldn't you have to zoom out, go to Middle East and zoom in again?

I liked what you were saying about using 3d pictures. Since the landscape isn't going to change, this would work fine.

Just in case it appears from my previous messages that I have my heart set on 3d, that isnt the case. Basically I was playing Superpower 2 (have a look at the globe its got, its basically what I was trying to achieve ), and thought of a million and one ways of improving/changing the idea. The graphics dont have to be great, since I'm just trying to develop the concept at the moment.

I'd start with a basic concept and ignore the graphics (partially), just to start. I know you are making a geo-political sim game. This is the high-level concept of the game. You obviously have some idea about the mid-level and detail-level concepts, since you are visualizing the ultimate graphics for this game . Nothing wrong with that.

What are the mid-level concepts? Can war(s) break out? If so, are they played out and handled like a game of risk or an rts? Will your politicians have to travel? How? Is travel instant, or do you have to schedule a secured flight and take some time to arrive (this kind of stuff really works well for strategy since you have to plan in advance). What resources are involved? Just money? Or are there farms, mines, forests, etc. resource that make land valueable. Will these be on the map? How important are the exact boarders between countries?

As you can see, by answering some of these questions, the map will probably have to be different to accomodate different situations. It will help to determine if you need a tile-map, or just an area-map.

Detail-level is not really needed until you have at least the map and some of the user interface worked out. The detail-level would consist of thing like the formulas on how money is earned and resources are gathered and politicians actually wheel and deal. It's the heart of your game system. You can have it worked out before hand, but after the UI and basic graphics is the latest point you should work on the details.

So - why the long game-creation explanation? Providing some more information about what you want will help others help you. You don't have to provide specifics about what you want, or even why you need it a particular way (unless a work-around is needed). So, my first questions are:

3d or 2d - make a decision. Be fairly sure on this one as changing later might mean re-writing most-or-all of your code.
Tile or area map - a tile map would be like Sim City. An area map would be like a map drawn on paper (better graphics of course). Objects (cities, landmarks, buildings...) on an area map can be anywhere, but on a tile map, they have to fit in the tiles (or over several tiles). You can blend the two like most rts games do. The map is tile, but object placement is very flexible.