Map suggestion

[GoldenRivet]

Originally Posted by Seeadler

According to a dev-answer on the german ubi-forum, the earth is again a cylindrical projection. They have tried other projections, which used a real globe, but the barriers to usability, freedom and clarity were just too big to develop this further. There were also some technical difficulties which arised in connection with other geographic projections.

Unfortunate

understandable

but unfortunate

[looney]

Somethin for SH6 then

maybe have different maps to navigate on.. so you have to change them during your mission.

[Kaleun_Endrass]

Originally Posted by looney

Somethin for SH6 then.

I hope so. Can't be really that difficult, or at least not impossible. FSX has it, Google Earth has it... there are more for sure.
If you restrict zoom levels, then some sort of RenderToTexture could calculate our maps and the engine could display them on a rectangle surface in 3D or 2D. I don't think that would confuse anyone because it would still look the same. In fact, with the according love to eye-candy, it would look like original ones.

[thesarunat]

I really would not reiterate on this stuff as it could be seen as whining by the developers (which I dearly thank for their effort).
However, I really cannot understand what is the problem with these charts. I think the following compromise could be extremely easy to implement and the newbie will not even notice the complexity. So, let's start.

I guess that, as pointed up before, far away ships are not floating by in the oceans but are just entries in a database.
The latter contains the informations that are used to generate the 3D local bubble which is centered on the player's sub, which is probably itself an entry in this database.

Now, I can see no reason why the map that we are to see in the command room HAS to have the same "geometry" as the database. I will explain more in detail.

The objects are located by two coordinates on the (mercator) map, let's say X and Y. The geometry is that of a flat plane, so this generates the well known distortions of distances and speeds the further we move from the equator.
BUT, the map has only to provide our position! We do not want to LIVE on the map

So: in the internal database use the real latitude and longitude coordinates (say, Phi and Lambda).
The corresponding projection on our map will be then given by (Wikipedia + me):

X = Lambda
Y = Ln[ Tan(Phi) + Sec(Phi) ]

The movement are computed with the true coordinates (and updated in the database) with the formula:

V = R d_Phi / d_t + R Sin(Phi) d_Lambda / d_t

(also wikipedia or any bachelor-level geometry book).


This would be completely masked to the user (hence no problem with newcomers), and this will work the same way as the system which is used now to compute the movement of the objects. Only, much more accurate for the people who care.

This also will not prevent you to click on the map to plot your course, as before. But this time taking the straight line will not be the shortest one. A simple geodetic calculator can also be implemented in the navigator AI so that when you click on the map, instead of drawing the straight line, the guy plots an approximation to the good geodesic (say, using 10 or 20 intermediate points).

Thanks for reading
...and thanks again to the developers

[rosentorf]

Originally Posted by thesarunat

This also will not prevent you to click on the map to plot your course, as before. But this time taking the straight line will not be the shortest one. A simple geodetic calculator can also be implemented in the navigator AI so that when you click on the map, instead of drawing the straight line, the guy plots an approximation to the good geodesic (say, using 10 or 20 intermediate points).

Thanks for reading
...and thanks again to the developers

I second that. And for attack-ploting one could have a attack-map that is plain flat andhas plotting tools...it's just like plotting on an empty sheet of paper.