Hello All, I am trying to program a game board in 3D space. The board is attached, for my needs, to a spherical object I have created under DirectX 9.0c Feb 2005. D3DXCreateSphere( pd3dDevice, fRadius, fSlices, fStacks, &pTempSunMesh, NULL ); A) I now want to attach pieces of the board to this sphere uniformly. I thought well I could use a bitmap, to represent the board pieces, and I got onto sprites and textures. -------a. Pieces are uniform in shape and size, for all pieces, and since it's DirectX that is on the order of 32x32 B) In order to use all of this, I need to create a structure to hold my pieces, as represented in 3d space, like where they are, in relation to other pieces. C) I thought, well I could use the normals or vectors of the sphere to accomplish this?? D) This is on the order of a 3d map editor in space, but luckily for now all I really want is for the program to decide what the pieces do. E) I have looked into Spherical maps, but that doesn't seem to be the uppht I need. I am pretty sure it has something to do with transformations. I have seen different things though; such as I can't attach a sprite surface to a sphere surface. I am pretty much stuck, and would like to throw this out to everyone and see if I can't get some braver people out there to tackle this one. MikHaven [Edited by - MikHaven on February 13, 2005 8:24:27 AM]

Quote:Original post by superpig
I don't quite understand. You're trying to wrap a game board around a sphere?

Yeah, basically that's exactly what I am trying to do. I will provide some links to get a general idea, of where I am headed.

http://www.mvps.org/directx/articles/spheremap.htm

OK guess that's it, sorry. If you look at the pictures, not the way he did it, because I want to make a game board itself, like the white backround with black boxes in the demo pictures.

I need to beable to sort and control which textures each of those squares are.

OK, due to lack of forum control, I am imaging a front half, of the right side of the sphere in 2d. WOOT I figured out how to show it in the forum.

Starter:

---0
--000
-00000
--000
---0

Like that, and then I can change the boxes however I want.

Round 1:

---1
--000
-01000
--001
---0

---0
--010
-10010
--100
---0

So you see it's more of a control and placement issue, I think. And how to store all the boxes, in 3d space, when I am done.

So yah, one way of storing all the points was building from scratch.

Like in the last example, something like this

---A
--BCD
-EFGHI
--JKL
---M

Woot! I just raised my ascii skills, but 2 points.

Anyways you get the general idea, then I can loop through the elements and change them according to some logic.

I'm not sure what exactly you want but to draw a 3d sphere produced from multiple boxes I would do the following.

Declare a 3d array of boxes which would give you a cuboid. You can then 'cut' that cuboid down to show a sphere by testing against a radius. If you set each box to have a mid-point, choose an arbitrary centre for your sphere and test the mid-point against the radius of the sphere from that central point. If the box is within the radius then flag it to be used, else set it to be ignored.

Thanks for the suggestions, however I guess I really don't understand the math, or really what I am asking. I thought I could do it much more simply than I have been trying, however it's not even remotely doing anything I want to do.

Here is what I have so far..
Just imagine it's coded correctly : (



And in the Draw Sprites, I draw each square on the normal, or the vertice


I am understanding now, maybe I should transform the sprites to orientate them around the sphere.

I have found several code snipets to do the sphere myself, but they mostly seem to be in opengl, and I have been having troubles converting them.

Thanks, for all your help...