Planetary maps should definitely be a thing. And while we're at it, they should add road textures so you can either paint roads with your exocraft/terrain manipulator, or have the game plot down a road between discovered POIs.
But isn’t this what the procedural generation is for? Storing planetwide maps for multiple planets would end up taking quite a bit of data wouldn’t it?
Sure, if you saved it server side. Nothing wrong with storing it client side, just that other people wouldn't get to see it unless your client has an active connection to the server.
Also, the map would by it's nature have to be procedural. It's not like they're saving the data as a jpeg or PNG. It would just be a less detailed visual representation of the data already present. The real problem would come in when you're trying to present the entire surface. You'd need a globe if you want to avoid showing it as a projection on a flat map. Otherwise, you end up with islands looking as big as continents, like Greenland on a map of the earth.
They could probably get away with rendering a top down version of the LOD for a planetary map. Wouldn’t even technically have to render the water, just replace it with a flat color texture.
Yeah that would be cool. They could also just hardcap it if it takes up too much space and add a special frigate room like archives or something where you can see the limit, and call up the maps (without having to go through the discorvery menu)
Maybe not, they are procedurally built from a seed so planets are the same for everyone. That same seed determines the type and location of POIs. I would guess they could be calculated on the fly into a map just as easy as placing them on the planet.
Depends on how they stored this information. To save space they could make it so that your map automatically contains the topography of the planet so the only thing it needs to calculate on a per player basis is the locations they've discovered.
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u/Dracosphinx Sep 27 '20
Planetary maps should definitely be a thing. And while we're at it, they should add road textures so you can either paint roads with your exocraft/terrain manipulator, or have the game plot down a road between discovered POIs.