Geodesic globe WIP

This project is live on the Asset Store - HexGlobe
(v1.02 released 10/29/12)

Web Demo:
http://www.electricrune.com/Worlds4/GeoGlobe4.html


The Early Version (0.1)
(keep reading for 0.2)
http://www.electricrune.com/GeoSphere/GeoSphere.html



My first version used a limited subdivision routine that could only split the faces into halves/quarters/eighths/etc, and it crashed with too many vertices after level five.

The picture above (and the player) show level three, with eight divisions per original face.
It could do 16 and 32, but crashed at level six (64 divisions).

Still, I used it as an early prototype, figuring out how to place the interactive components on the map, and key them to the actual surface.
In the first demo, you can mouse over the individual hexes, and the GUI will display vars that are associated with each hex on the globe (Latitude, Longitude, and the terrain type).
This demo also shows a routine I am experimenting with to make the map look less 'hexellated': the actual colors of the hex are painted on the hex, but stops short of the border, leaving a white band.
Then I run what I call a 'FireFill' on the white area which basically randomly grows the existing neighboring colors into the white space until it is all filled.
It is pretty basic (and slow), but it is experimental at this point.

I didn't like the restriction on how many times I could subdivide each original facet, so I started over from the ground up, and this is the result so far:

Version 0.2

http://www.electricrune.com/Worlds/Worlds.html



I threw a texture from an icosahedral map of Earth. The seams that are apparent are from that texture, when the textures are blank, it is smooth as a cue ball. This picture shows level 50, with 100-mile hexes, 250 around the Equator, and 25002 hexes (12 are always pentagons, at any level).
This one doesn't have the code to highlight the hexes yet, but I have implemented that in the working version. (This version is about five days old)
Also, the actual painting of the hex colors isn't in this version, but it is part of the current version I am working on at this very moment.

Drag the slider on the left to get started, a button will appear once the value has been changed.
You can see the data on number of hexes, length of the Equator, and size of the hexes updating as you slide.
Click MAKE GLOBE, and it will tessellate and normalize the globe to a sphere.
Click DRAW HEXES to draw the hex borders. There will be a slight pause during processing, I didn't write it as a co-routine (yet).

This version can hexellate the globe anywhere from two to one hundred hexes per original triangle edge.
(Actually, it can go up to 140 before it starts to run into vertex limitations)

Stats on a level 100 globe:
Equator = 500 hexes
Hex Size = 50 miles (flat side measurement)
Number of Hexes = 99,990 (+12 pentagons)

I used a layered material, so the hex borders are a separate texture from the underlying map data, and could be toggled on and off. They can also be of two different resolutions.
I've come up with a very fast way of drawing the textures; those hexes are calculated and drawn in real time, hence the short pause when you click DRAW HEXES. Drawing filled hexes takes a little longer, but its really pretty quick, considering all the calculation going on...

Version 0.3...

Currently moving ahead to planetary terrain generation. I will seed the world with land, based on a given percentage of water/land, and then run a simple plate-tectonic model to bump up mountains and merge/tear apart landmasses.
This will establish where the land is, and what is mountain/hill/flat...

Then the plan is to generate a simple weather model to set up winds that will blow air from over water onto land, and establish biomes. Areas in the middle latitudes that get a lot of rain will be jungle; at higher latitudes, forest; at arctic level, glaciers. Areas that get winds that blow from overland will be dry (Desert/Steppe/Tundra).

The other thing that is in development is the simple fact that one could take any given section of the globe, or any specific hex, and expand and subdivide to any degree needed. You could take a 100-mile hex and blow it up and have twenty-mile hexes. Then you could have another level with one-mile hexes. Or you could just go straight to a map with 100 one-mile hexes...
A simple interpolative routine would use the terrains from the main hex and the neighbors, spread the terrain across the new sub-hexes, et viola...

I'm not sure yet what the final product is for this; whether it is something I try to sell on the Asset Store, if it is going to be a part of a war game, or if it is going to be part of a space game.

One thing I am sure of, it has worlds of potential... (ba-dum-bum-ting!)

 

Version 0.3

New version: the beginning of planetary terrain generation...
NOTE: THIS WILL NOT WORK ON CHROME
There are time-out issues in Chrome that crash on long pauses, this player wasn't designed with that in mind, but will be, going forward
http://www.electricrune.com/Worlds3/Worlds.html

This is a globe with twenty subdivisions, with 100 hexes around the equator; if this is an Earth-sized globe, each hex is 250 miles across.

A slider selects the percentage of water, and then runs a cellular algorithm on the randomized start to clump up the land.
(truly random land looks terrible, so it was necessary to run this algorithm. A lot.)

Right-drag to rotate the globe; you can also mouse-over the globe to display the lat/long, climate zone, and terrain type.
Also added an unfolded map in the corner.

Just the first phase. Next, a plate-tectonic simulation to grow mountains. First pass will probably simply use the triangular original faces as the plates, so mountains will tend to be along the edges of those zones.

Later, I can see some refinement where the plates are built by a randomized flood-fill type routine...

 

Version .3 Link is not working. This project is interesting. What is the advantage having a HexPlanet, or isn't there one?

 

Sorry, typo...

What do you mean, what is the advantage?

I think most people who experiment with this want to move away from the Civ-type model, where the world can wrap from east to west, but the poles are impassable. I essence, you play either on a plane, or a cylinder where you cannot cross over the ends.
With the GeoGlobe, you can have paths that approximate Great Circle routes

I started doing this as a project to hexellate a sphere, but I am starting to think that it's too confining to think totally inside the hexes. The way I have it now, the map doesn't have to have anything to do with the hex entities, except that the hexes draw themselves onto the map.
It could work the other way around... I could draw a detailed fractalized image on the map, and determine what terrain type each hex was by sampling the texture.
I am exploring several different angles, but it will almost certainly involve manipulating a tri-mesh using some sort of fractal routines.

I hope to be able to take sections of the globe and apply a fractalizing routine and create detailed surface maps.
Using a version of the n-level triangle subdividing function I wrote, I could take the six triangles surrounding any given hex.
The outside corners and the center can be seeded with the terrain from the planet map. Then you could do a triangle version of the square-diamond process to subdivide and randomly distort the terrain in between to whatever degree is needed...

 

Ok, the .3 example is not populating on my computer. (Tried three times). Running Chrome. Thanks for your detailed explanation. I guess it's about hexellating rather than triangulating. I'm still a little in the dark though. Why not just use a triangulated sphere?

 

Well, when I say 'a few seconds,' it actually takes 57 seconds on my end...

It's slow because I'm running the cellular function 1000 times.
Also, Unity is a little slow on the texture drawing routines...
I plan on this part being generated off-line, this is just for demo purposes.

The other benefit of this type of sphere over the regular sphere is that all adjacent vertices are almost the same length.
On a regular sphere, as you go away from the equator, the east/west vertices get closer and closer, like the lines of longitude on a globe. Essentially, a Unity Sphere is a distorted cylinder with no ends.
In this version, you can always move in 6 directions (5 in twelve places), and each move choice will be almost the same distance.
I say almost because there is about 20% difference between the minimum and the maximum side length, but this is not between adjacent verts, but the sides next to the poles vs. the sides in the center of the triangular regions.

And as to triangulating vs. hexellating, this is really both...

My hexes are at the corners of the tri-mesh. If you take one of these verts and find the center of the triangles around it, and connect those points, you end up with a hexagon.
Its essentially a Voronoi diagram, with points in a regular triangular pattern...

 

I'm very interested about that because I have a great idea about a game using this solution !

 

Ok, that has clarified it somewhat.

 

I'm interested in why it's not running for you... Do the other two versions work?

It might take longer on some computers, like I said, I plan to take this part off-line in final production...
The only pause you'd see in this case is the initial pause when it first loads...
It is slow because I'm processing the map 1000 times with a cellular automata routine to make it look like real terrain, rather than a random scattering.

 

I'm curious, are you still working on this?

 

Thanks for your interest; here's a status report

I'm working on three things that are closely related...

I'm getting close to wrapping up a new version of HexTech, using a segmented fractal landscape to enable hex maps of unlimited size.

The techniques I'm perfecting in the flat map will transfer over to the release version of this project.
The early versions of GeoGlobe use a sphere collider at each hex with a MouseOver function.
This has performance issues when the number of hexes got high.
The pointer routine I'm perfecting with the flat map will make larger globes much more functional.

The third thing is the game that is my background project, the thing that I'm developing this all for in the first place...
You can find a lot of discussion about that game and the technical aspects of the flat map in this thread:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/143632-Glyph-Fantasy-4X-TBS

So, in summary, my to-do list:
1) Update HexTech to 2.0
2) Finish development of GeoGlobe and release on Asset Store
3) Glyph (next step is Combat Engine)

 

Working on another project, I've discovered there are some time out issues with Chrome.
If you have a processor-intensive task that holds the computer up for over twenty-thirty seconds, the webplayer will crash.
This is taking a lot of time processing and clumping the land; when I get back to development on this, it won't be a problem going forward.

 

Interesting, look forward to V2.0.

 

Just finished updating HexTech to 2.0; will release after a short testing interval.
If you're interested, link is two posts up...

Actively working on this project again, seeing hex-covered spheres in my dreams...

 

An early test of the fractalizer routine. The regions do not splice at the edges, yet, but this should give a decent preview of what I am going for with this...

[EDIT: something went wonky with the image, re-attached four posts down...]

 

Hey Tasarran. It's great to see some progress on this, I am sure I am not the only one who is waiting for this one to be released. The thing is that I don't know to which screenshot you are referring to in your last post. Maybe you forgot to attach it?

Edit: According to the page's code, the attachment is there; however it's not rendering for me ...

 

Working for me.

 

Heh dude this is pretty cool.

 

[EDIT: OK, this one is working... That was strange...]

 

Now I get it! That pic is beyond awesome, I love the noise applied to the coast; it makes it quite realistic. Is this based on a 2d map as HexTech or you are using some random seed with noise to create the terrain? I would like to have both approaches, but it's more important for me to be able to recreate the earth from a 2D image, than have totally random planets; although I can see why that can be even better. In any case I can't hardly wait to get under the hood on this, excellent work as usual Tasarran.

 

Right now, that shot is just random noise; ie: a random height applied to each hex-center vertex, and then a version of the terrain fractal subdivider routine from the flat map is run on that low-res mesh.

It really wasn't anything I intended to publish; but when I saw it, I knew it was something you guys who were following the thread would want to see, so I took a screenie

I am working on making the map data image like the flat map.
This is a map that I pulled off the net, with a grid overlaid, followed by the working map data file that I traced from that. (I drew in the terrain only based on height, since this map was just a topographic relief map, some areas are mountains on my map that are merely high elevation in the real world. If I mis-represented your favorite part of the Earth, bear in mind this is just a temporary map I threw together in about half an hour. )

I also have the terrain coloring working the same as it works in the 2D map; I could be painting mountains around the map at this point, but I wanted to get the data structure down before I started showing that part off.

Finding the right data structure to hold the data was interesting... No square arrays allowed here!
It is both easier and harder than the flat map; in the flat map, the hexes are all the same size, but the number of map sections could vary. In the globe, the number of regions is set, but the size and number of the hexes vary.

I've settled for now on a jagged array, even though I know those are less than ideal; I just don't see any other way to deal with it ATM.

 

Turns out the hard part wasn't reading the data from a non-rectangular map, or being able to store non-rectangular data; the tricky part was then taking that data and applying it to the globe.

After figuring out a really weird set of algorithms, here is the result:


A shot from the player on the left, and the Editor looking out over South America on the right...

The edges aren't stitched together, you can see a seam running up the Andes, that is next on the agenda!

 

Wow. That just looks awesome Tasarran! How many hexes are you rendering there? At first sight they seem to be at least 500 km large, probably much more. Correct me if I am wrong, but as I understand it the hexes shape the terrain at map creation and thus have little impact on performance after that. I know it's early to tell, but I am worried about performance; my idea is to have 200 km hexes and that means a lot of them to take up resources. In any case If you keep this up I am going to run out of excuses for not starting to code this great strategy game I have in my head

 

That shot is a 20-Globe. 20 hexes per original triangle edge; 100 hexes around the equator, 250 miles across each hex, 4002 hexes. About 400 km across each hex.
Roughly equivalent to a 80x50 rectangular map.

200 km is 125 mi, which is a 40-Globe, with 16,002 hexes; or double the size of the one shown here.
No problem at all...

A great thing about this globe, is that increasing the number of hexes doesn't really increase overhead, because the number of textures is constant
It doesn't matter how dense the meshes get, the engine can always handle 20 full-size (65000 verts) meshes.

Creation can be slower when the number of hexes increase, but a 100-Globe will run just as smooth as a 20-Globe...

 

This is a globe with 25000 hexes, 250 around the equator, 100 miles per hex (160km).
I added a basic pointer to illustrate that this is a globe made of hexes, not just a pretty mesh.
Not sure if this has too long a delay at the beginning; it might not work on Chrome, please let me know if this is the case.

http://www.electricrune.com/Worlds4/GeoGlobe4.html

View attachment 38970

 

INCREDIBLE work! Wow, this could really solve some issues when trying to partition a planet for zone control games!

 

Can't say nothing else but agree with Veqtor! Awesome work Tasarran. You sure are making us lust after this tech, with all those sweet screens and web players. In any case, I don't really want to sound more impatient that I already am, but do you know when you might be releasing this and/or the new version of HexTech?

 

I thought I already updated HexTech to 2.0, but I guess I hallucinated that...
I'll be updating HexTech to 2.0 this week...

And I only have one more minor thing to add to GlobeTech before release; seaming the edges together.
I should release it before Monday.

 

Cool, does it need unity pro or does it work with free?

 

Works just fine with Unity free!

 

No release yet; I hope to release by this weekend.

 

I submitted to the Store early this morning; I will post a thread in the Asset Store forum when it is accepted, and update this thread, too.

 

Hey Tasarran. Any update on HexTech update and/or the Geodesic Globe release? It seemed so imminent and now it's been a while since the last update, I hope everything is ok.

 

I'm still waiting on approval from the Asset Store people; it's been over a week, but when you submit, it says it might take a while.

I want it to be published as much, if not more than you guys do; I check my mail about ten times a day looking for it...

 

Accepted at last! Now available on the Asset Store!

 

Wonderful news Tasarran! I will be checking this one out as soon as I get home.

 

I am really tempted to use your plugin in my game if you are able to support mobile devices anytime soon.

1- What are your future plans for this plugin?
2- When do you expect to support mobile devices?
3- How many draw calls do you get when you generate the earth globe?
4- Is it possible to lower the number of hexes to approximately 1000 for the Earth Globe? If yes then may be your plugin will work on mobile devices without any further change from your part.

Thank you and keep up the good work.

 

This looks amazing! I want it, but I have no use for it! Looks good though, one day if I need to make a strategy, this will for sure be my first choice! Good job!

Cheers
Khelton

 

Future plans... I have plans to use it in a game I am making, but I don't have a LOT of plans to add more to it... Maybe a layer that could do territory borderlines, ala Civilization... Maybe a cloud layer...

I am working on a version for mobiles that doesn't do the fractal mesh distortion; it will generate a smooth globe with textures.

The current version uses 23 draw calls, but the mobile 'lite' version will be missing the ocean meshes (they will be painted instead), so it will have some number less.

A globe of 10 divisions per face is 1002 hexes. If you look at the top of the post, Version 0.2 is pretty much what I am aiming for the 'lite' version to be...

 

Would it be wrong of me to hope that it inspires you to make a game that you can't resist making?

There's also a flat version: HexTech; take a look at these threads:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/89348-Pre-alpha-tile-based-hexagon-4X-engine
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/10...-Based-Map-Framework-available-on-Asset-Store

 

Hi,

I have recently purchased your plugin but I am not getting the same results as your demo regarding the Earth Globe (http://www.electricrune.com/Worlds4/GeoGlobe4.html)

I have attached an image file with this post showing what I am getting and the Hex-10 map configuration I did. By the way its also happening with the Hex-50 map.

Also when I enable the Build Textures checkbox Unity freezes.

I just want it to work like your demo then I will go deep into your code.

I may be able to convert your code to C# as this is the first thing I will do after all issues above are solved.

Thank you.

 

Sorry, I thought I had responded already; I PMed you.

 

So Tasarran when can we expect the mobile version? Mesh distortion is nothing I can't live without and any optimizations that come for this new version will be most welcome. It would be desired that the tool generates the normal and bump map textures as well, thus giving the illusion of height in the surface of the sphere. Cloud and empire borders would also be awesome to have as well, so we don't have to implement them; it's almost certain that anyone using these tools will indeed need them. If you can get these changes into the tool, this will give it renewed interest and thus higher visibility in the community; maybe finally get reviews in the store as well as recognition here.

 

Still working on it; a crimp has been put in my schedule by the holidays and some other personal obligations, but things are starting to loosen up now, and there should be further developments soon.

 

Hi Tasarran,

I was able to fully convert your plugin to C#.
Also I was able to make it work with Hex-10 Map on mobile devices at least it works fine on my HTC One X without quality change.
And I was able to create my own A star path-finding algorithm to make units move from one point to another.

I just need some info regarding the territory map. First are you in the process of making it yourself soon? If yes when do you think it will be finished. If not could you guide me how to do it. I tried to do something similar to your "PaintBorders" functions but it seems it duplicates lines on several facets of the globe. A pseudo code would be very helpful if possible.

Second, I know your busy but could you provide in your next version a better quality map for the Hex-10. Countries are not well defined like Italy for example. Also if you could build the textures afterwards for the new Hex-10 map that would be great because I am still unable to build those textures. By the way, I know you told me that it take a lot of time to build the textures but could you give me an approximate time for building a Hex-10 map?

Thank you.

 

I am getting the lock up problem when building textures... seems to infinitely loop in unity taking up my cpu to 100% usage. Ive let it sit for 20 minutes. Im on a core 2 duo 3.0 system.... I would think I could run this with out it taking 20 minutes.

I am interested in the c# version.

 

my unity web player doesnt work. at all. any ideas why?

 

Are you using Chrome?
The Unity player has been disabled by Google in Chrome for a little while now.

http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/183262/web-player-will-not-install-on-google-chrome.html

 

Hi Tasarran, first of all congrats on the great work.

I'm currently trying to come up with a way to make a seamless grid'ed planet (eventually with multiple LOD) and your approach seams much more interesting in terms of splitting up the planet to be able to render only what the player sees.

What i have so far, and this is mostly about knowing what you think, is the generation of the 6 faces of a cube (subdivided to the resolution i want) and then i spherify it using "vertex.normalized * radius" (no perlin noise or other height modification yet).

My problem now is how am i supposed to break the planet into chunks so that i only have the one the player is on at the moment (plus the adjacent ones). And i'm coming to the conclusion that my original approach for the generation is not ideal.

Any thoughts?

Thanks in advance,
Pedro

 

That would work... Starting with a cube means that there will be more distortion at the center.

I'm unsure why you need only the section you are on?