Cylindrical Earth

Frederf · 02-10-10, 04:41 AM

This thread is intended as a place to discuss the actual features of the game Silent Hunter 5 based what is visible in videos, screenshots or available from interviews and press materials. Since the digital rights management aspect, controversial as it may be, is not game feature it is not appropriate for discussion in this thread; there are many other threads for such talk.

One flaw of Silent Hunter 3 and Silent Hunter 4 is that the world and the map were one and the same. The map was flat and the world was flat. This made programming easy but had nasty real world consequences. Distances (and transit times) between real world places were shown to be much, much bigger in the flat world of Silent Hunter. The real routes taken by ships over the real Earth and straight lines on the map were different leaving historical sources and in-game needs at odds.

The ideal solution is to separate the mapspace from the worldspace so one can look at a flat map on the desk of a submarine but also travel through a world of real spherical shape. There are complications for the mapspace tools as long lines of shortest distance between points are actually curves when view through the distortion of the map projection, but this is well within the capability of programming.

In some interview or text, I heard that SHV is adopting a cylindrical world which is a far, far cry from a spherical world. It seems so foolish to go through all the effort of a change and not come close to a long term solution. Surely the very shape of the Earth is a good foundation for a simulation about submarines with ranges on the order of 10,000nm.

02-10-10, 04:41 AM	#1
Frederf Seasoned Skipper Join Date: Apr 2005 Posts: 665 Downloads: 79 Uploads: 1	Cylindrical Earth This thread is intended as a place to discuss the actual features of the game Silent Hunter 5 based what is visible in videos, screenshots or available from interviews and press materials. Since the digital rights management aspect, controversial as it may be, is not game feature it is not appropriate for discussion in this thread; there are many other threads for such talk. One flaw of Silent Hunter 3 and Silent Hunter 4 is that the world and the map were one and the same. The map was flat and the world was flat. This made programming easy but had nasty real world consequences. Distances (and transit times) between real world places were shown to be much, much bigger in the flat world of Silent Hunter. The real routes taken by ships over the real Earth and straight lines on the map were different leaving historical sources and in-game needs at odds. The ideal solution is to separate the mapspace from the worldspace so one can look at a flat map on the desk of a submarine but also travel through a world of real spherical shape. There are complications for the mapspace tools as long lines of shortest distance between points are actually curves when view through the distortion of the map projection, but this is well within the capability of programming. In some interview or text, I heard that SHV is adopting a cylindrical world which is a far, far cry from a spherical world. It seems so foolish to go through all the effort of a change and not come close to a long term solution. Surely the very shape of the Earth is a good foundation for a simulation about submarines with ranges on the order of 10,000nm.