There once was a great game for the Commodor 64, and ported to the PC back in the days of EGA and early VGA, of a space-trader game called Elite. You can still find the PC version on the web.
My Design Philo question is: does anyone have any thoughts, designs, or snippets that could be used to recreate the Elite radar system that showed ships around you as well as above and below. I was thinking along the lines of the mini-map demo, but I'm not sure how to hack that to get objects at different 'elevations' of objects in relationship to the ship using the radar (yes, this is for ideas concerning my space-sim project...).
I'm wanting to use the 'space-environment' in a 3D-cube space (for example: a 100x100x100 'sector'), and thought that the method used by the elite radar would be useful in tracking other ships in that 3D space, without actually trying to represent 3D space (other than placing ships in different Z-levels).
Constructive comments and theories are welcome...
ID:153975
 Sep 16 2002, 1:29 am
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Check out the mini-map demo.
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Sariat wrote:
Check out the mini-map demo. Um...you don't actually read posts do you? Otherwise you would have not made such a utterly useless comment... I know the mini-map should be a good place to start - otherwise I would not have mentioned it in my original post!!! The problem is how to adapt it to visually represent 3d space - similar to what the game Elite does with its space radar... | |
Then why not use the mini-map demo? It's a DEMO. To show you how things of that sort work. So you can do shiznits to the biznits with it!
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The easiest way to represent a 3d radar map in a 2d system that Ive seen -has- to be the use of colour in the radar screen ^^
What Id do personally is chose 2 colours. Say, red and blue. Red will represent ships -above- your ship, and blue will represent ships -below- your ship. As a ship gets farther away from yours, the color gets darker. So a ship directly under you will be a bright livid blue, while a ship directly above you will be a bright, bright red. A ship at the outside of your radar above would be a dark, dark red, and below would be a dark dark blue. Im sure you could work something along these lines out with the colour commands as well, rather then having a pile of different icons or such ^_^ Just a thought~ El | |
Yeah, the N64 Star Wars Rogue Squadron (and GC Rogue Leader) uses that type of radar... It works really well...
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Actually, another meathod just occured to me thinking about this. Depending on how you want to set the game up, you could set the radar up as a first person radar (Ill explain). Again, Ill not take credit for this idea, its come outa games Ive played in the past. Wing Commander in this instance..
Baasicaly, the radar screen shows where your ship is looking. Its not set for north, or up, or anything, its based on the ships orientation and perspective. Graphicaly it can be organized anyway you like, but for the wing commander example, the radar consists of a circle divided into 4 areas (up, down, left and right quarters) with a thin circle surrounding the whole arangement. Where the quarters all meet is the center of the radar screen (duh) its also where your ship is currently looking. The upper quadrant depicts ships that are above yours. The bottom one below, the other 2 quadrants should be self explanitory. The neat part comes into the circle around the edges. Any ship in this area is -behind- you. So if a ship is in the upper quadrant, but in the outer circle, then it is above and behind you. Basical what its doing is setting up the radar as if you were looking at the ships, with the added circle to show stuff behind. Pretty simple ^^ I was toying with the design theary of a wanna-be 3d space engine witht he same principles, I just suck at coding so badly that I never attempted it *L* ^_^ Just another idea ^^ El | |
Cant say i have ever played it and i will try it in a hour or so gotta essay to finish