Populous spherical world
Author
Does anyone have any ideas how the old game Populous: The Beginning did their spherical world terrains? From what I can tell it's a tiled terrain but when you zoom out it becomes completely spherical. It appears to be some kind of trick but I'm not quite sure how they do it. Do they basically wrap a 2D plane (the tiled terrain) around a sphere in real-time?
Are you sure the world was completely spherical? I only played the game a little bit. I don't remember ever seeing the world as a complete sphere. I remember them having a close-up that looked spherical. That could be done as a trick though. I suspect they actually had a 2D map the wrapped around on both axis, thus it would be the same topology as a torus. It would be really easy to draw a close-up that appeared spherical but wasn't.
I have no idea what that game did, but you could have spherical terrain. Take an octahedron. Subdivide the triangles into 4, like this (scuse the ascii art):
EDIT: It destroyed my ascii art, so I've added full stops in the hopes that it will not think it's a continued line or something.
Repeat until you have enough detail, and push the vertices out so it looks spherical. Not as simple as normal terrain of course, but it should still be possible to do fast collision detection and things. I'm pretty sure it's possible to work out which triangle is in a particular direction from the centre of the sphere (which would no doubt be useful), just don't ask me how.
/\. /__\. /\ /\. /__\/__\.EDIT: It destroyed my ascii art, so I've added full stops in the hopes that it will not think it's a continued line or something.
Repeat until you have enough detail, and push the vertices out so it looks spherical. Not as simple as normal terrain of course, but it should still be possible to do fast collision detection and things. I'm pretty sure it's possible to work out which triangle is in a particular direction from the centre of the sphere (which would no doubt be useful), just don't ask me how.
You could also have 6 flat terrains arranged as a cube centred about the origin, and then project all the vertices back onto a sphere the radius of the planet.
Yeah, from what I remember Populous had a zoomed out sphere view which was completely flat and only showed you the locations of your buildings and what have you, and then a zoomed in view that -looked- as though it was on the surface of a sphere but which was actually just a planar view distorted toward the horizon. It was a neat trick nonetheless.
Check out what I'm doing here ... Dominate . Thats an increasingly subdivided icosahedron with a fractal function applied to the vertices, moving them closer or further away from the origin. texturing is applied according to height as per normal landscape texturing. Thats a pretty old demo but you get the idea, you can mess around with the creation parameters in the demo.
D.
Author
I appreciate the advice but I'm not looking for a complete spherical terrain solution, I'm just wondering how they managed to make a 2D planar terrain look spherical at times. As daireq pointed out, it was all just a trick as I suspected.
Thanks guys!
Thanks guys!
Populous does look convincingly sphere-ical. However, Spore is known to be truly a sphere. Information on that (or how you'd go about doing that) could be usefull.
hehe last time i checked the real world was a sphere, the last time it was flat was the dark ages. (dos? hehe)
anyway i would think that spore being procedural and all has a height map in memory and generates local terrain off that, when you are zoomed in to that level, and just has a ball with the height map controlling the height of the vertices to it to give it bumpiness, or something similiar. but then again I'm not will wright, he may have some cool algoriths pumping it all out, from nothing.
anyway i would think that spore being procedural and all has a height map in memory and generates local terrain off that, when you are zoomed in to that level, and just has a ball with the height map controlling the height of the vertices to it to give it bumpiness, or something similiar. but then again I'm not will wright, he may have some cool algoriths pumping it all out, from nothing.
I dont see why you couldn't use a vertex shader to warp the distant parts of your terrain, making it appear spherical
Quote:Original post by daireq
texturing is applied according to height as per normal landscape texturing. Thats a pretty old demo but you get the idea, you can mess around with the creation parameters in the demo.
Is that open source? Unfortunately I was unable to run it (OS X, I can give you the exception if this is news).
I've been working on something similar (a tessellated icosahedron as a planet). Anyway, how do you map a rectangular texture to your sphere?
EDIT:
Actually, I just got it running in a Windows VM. It is very cool.
[Edited by - kordova on August 19, 2006 6:53:11 AM]
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