So, you may have already thought of this, but those pole boundaries are a little silly, but as a guy who's spent a bunch of time working on maps, I'm curious to know, why not just use procedural teleportation? Here's what I mean, here's a map of the world as we westerners are used to looking at it: It's pretty good, but you have this big problem in that if you go to far up, you leave the map, that's not like a shperical planet at all. When we talk about spherical traversal, really what we want is that if we go up too far, we want to start going down. I can use a different map projection to illustrate this: The travel represented by the arrow on that projection is the same as the travel represented by the arrow on this projection: Where that line in the middle is the meridian. I'm just curious to know what the thought process behind not doing it that way? Erp: Kudos if you notice my geometry fail. I'm leaving it here because it's embarassing, and it feels dishonest to scrub the mistake. You get what I'm saying, you know, along with: "mistakes are hilarious"
The only thing I can see is what map makers have been dealing with since map making was a thing. The square map of the world is flawed because the farther you get from the equator, the more stretching happens in the map. Earth, for example, can't be accurately displayed on a flat map. Globes are the only way to show accurate scaling of every landmass and ocean otherwise the map would look like this... To Teleport at the poles would break the illusion that the playfields are round and not a rectangle because you would end up teleporting right next to where you entered the pole at. Other than making the playfields round, there really isn't a way to do this.
I mean, the solution that I just proposed doesn't have that problem, it behaves the way travel on a globe would
Just as a side note : if they make much bigger "playfields" then lots of solutions could be applied to "access poles". But on tiny maps like we have at the moment, a teleport (like the green wall) that would "skip the poles" might not be a very appealing solution. If I was to make this change with superpowers and use your idea, then I would stretch the terrain to include the polar regions on top and bottom of the regular maps, and use the "green wall" system (your idea), so at least players could "fly over the poles"... while in fact they would just fly over the top / bottom of the regular maps.
I can see another solution using 2 "flat" maps : But in any case, like you mention, "teleporting" the player is not a solution because whatever is happening "on the other side" before the teleportation is just an illusion, or they would need to duplicate what is happening at the other end of the playfield just to show it where the player should be in a moment.
In principle, this could be solved with the concept of "guard cells" (as in particle-in-cell simulation codes): basically, any contiguous region on a planet has an overlap with surrounding regions on its borders and contains a duplicate of the terrain and objects in the overlap section. The transition between regions can then be fairly seamless, as the destination region would have the exact same data in the overlap section as the origin region, and all that would need to be loaded would be the parts of the destination region that were newly in view. The overlap region would have to be made large enough so that structures just outside of the overlap region wouldn't be visible anyway if there were no region transition, which would put additional computational load on the server. On the other hand, this sort of setup would lend itself nicely to a multi-threaded planetary environment, and would work very nicely for large spherical planets.
Exactly. But go figure why so many players are afraid to push for "round planets"... Every "trick" becomes so obvious on a small scale, and players / AI keep bumping into each other between red / green walls... Curvature of the planet would provide natural occlusion. I guess there is a problem with the voxel "grid" on a sphere, since all point in space cannot maintain uniform distance because loss of parallelism (center of gravity / sphere). So each "cell" would still remain "flat" to support a vexel grid, and curvature (at the horizon) should only be perceived at moderate distances from the ground, where some alternate "visualization" technique could replace the ground / structures on the fly...
I believe from what i read on the forums, they are working on spherical planets and thus see the FLAT maps as place holders for now
Devs are working on round planets for patch 8.0 AFAIK But to clarify your question the problem is not the teleportation, the green barrier already does that. The problem of the poles is that, as the map is in fact a square, you still can see that when you enter a planet from space, the first seconds you can clearly see a square map So for them to wrap that map in a round planet the terrain at the poles is all wrap around making for a very irregular and erratic terrain that can be clearly seen, not only that but if you walk around in there you will notice that you can never get to the very edge because as the map is wrap if you just keep going forward you end up walking around in circles, you can still test that by crossing the barrier with god mode. For that reason they had to block all that region and of course they could apply the teleport to take you from one side to the other but that would look a bit odd as you can see the terrain across the barrier but you would be teleported to much further down to a completely different location, it would be very different from what you see by crossing the green barrier
Kudos, this is clearly the "right" solution. I was curious as to why a much simpler fix hadn't been attempted
