Our galaxy can be 3000 light years thick, a lot more near the bulge, even though many portray it as a 2D disk, and thus in games like this it is portrayed so. not saying it can't be right the way it is, but it's a true 3D environment game, but seems to be based in a 2D Universe... true of many similar things. Any thoughts on making it 3D, would be strange route planning etc, but borders would be spherical, not circular, gives a lot more volume to the game, lol, ahh, god i'm rambling again...

Just wondering if anyone had ever given this thought...

One word: why? It doesn't seem to add anything but "cool" factor. =P

the idea is very cool, unfortunately in the past when we (the alpha testers) discussed this it was kinda looked at as an unneccesary complication to navigation. plotting a course in 3D adds a lot of difficulty to a game, and making a navigation system that would be easy enough for someone just starting to use would be almost impossible in a 3d map.

Perhaps the current navigation system is in 3D behind the UI; the computer flattens it for you for ease of use.

If it was displayed to you in the real layout, the map would be bigger and the lines connecting sectors would be insanely long. Remember, the wormholes move you through a huge amount of space, each system is not even relatively close to each other. because of this, depth is not needed in display, the universe is 3D, but the map need not be.

well, maybe what i'm getting at has been mentioned here, the sheer scale of things which is interpretted as a little flat map...

ohh well :) i can see how it would be difficult, i'm just throwing things around in my head and on here :)

keep doing so. you may hit on something cool that none of us has even thought of. thats why the board is here.

It would be cool, but since each sector is compartmentalized, and therefore, effectively isolated, there really isn't any dimensionality to the universe outside a single sector. The sectors could be in a big square, or a circle, or lined up one behind the other. Movement between sectors is 1D. You go in, you come out (Ion storms not included).

BUUUUT, having a cool looking 3D Universe Map would be nice... It would serve the same purpose, but look wicked cool!

I do not feel that 3D maps are necessary.

The System map is obviously designed for ease of use and not an exact representation of their positions in the Galaxy (who's to say they are all in the same galaxy any way).

As for the sector maps most objects in our own solar system are on the same plane (Pluto excluded) and can be simply displayed in 2D.

However, I do feel that the sector maps look a bit 'boxy', squares within a square. May I suggest, by just removing the grid and grid references will lend itself to a more open feel to the solar system. Obviously the objects in the system (stations, planets, asteroid fields, etc.) will need to be labelled on the map for navigational purposes. Other sectors could be described as '2 sectors north of Divine Duty' for example. When hi-lighting the sector with the mouse, instead of showing the sector as a box, maybe the sector could show a different shape. For instance a station sector could be round to represent the exclusion zone or a north/south asteroid field could be divided into a number of sectors, as it would be at the moment, but with the sector shapes reflecting the shape of the field. I know the sector shapes suggestion would take a lot to implement; a simpler alternative would be to, instead of hi-lighting the sector as a square, just show a dot that could indicate a nav point.

Going slightly of topic here. I feel the transition between sectors could benefit from an animation of sorts. Something like, an extension to the existing one showing your ship moving incredibly fast through the system, maybe having large objects your heading towards come into view. At the moment when you move between sectors and between systems you get the same image. To me, it doesn’t feel as though I have really moved. I do feel the hints and tips at the bottom of the screen a very useful, especially to new players and if possible should be included in the animation.

Please be gentle. This is my first post (anywhere) and I hope to be very active on these boards and in game.

The map is a navigational map. The systems are actually not located in the same position relative to each other. Wormholes are not line-of-sight. They warp and twist space-time. Making a map that correctly positions the different systems would look really nasty with lines going everywhere.

Unless a map has borders, it'd get difficult to find where you're going. Altrenately, what about this?

Once your ship reaches 50,000m from the system center, no animation happens, it just loads the next sector in that direction like you warped into it, and dumps you at 45,000m out again. You're responsible for getting in to the center. This would remove the isolation from the sectors, and although it's not practical to fly from sector to sector, it's good to know that you can. Potential problems:

1) It's a 3D universe, it's a 2D map
-Think of the directions as if you're slicing longitudinal apple wedges. Four big ones, each in an arc of 90 horizontal degrees at the equatorial point, narrowing to a nexus 50,000m up (and down) the Z axis from the origin point. Make a safety zone circle say 1000m in diameter at each nexus that picks a proximate sector at random to warp you into, to avoid people getting locked in endless loading.

how about something like this for the universe map, and possably the system map? easy to navagate and iy could still be on a grid, it would be very interesting to use. check it out, you could get some good ideas from it, it truely is a wonderful program.

PS: if you get it, zoom out till the stars start to move and then move your view around alittle, then you will see what i mean. just think of it like that, but with things labeled.(oh yea and if you cant see alot of stars, hit the "]" button alot until you see em all.

[link edited - RR]

Sorry to resurrect an old thread. It's better than starting a new one, right?

I was thinking it might be cool to rearrange the sector layout. The sytems are fine the way they are. I never felt that they represented the real shape of space anyway, since you have to use wormholes to travel between them. However, the sectors within the systems represent actual physical space. In other words, sectors next to eachother on the map are actually next to eachother in space (as evidenced by the asteroid belts and such).

I think it might be cool to change our current 2D, 16x16, square sector grid layout to a 3D, 6x6x6, cube layout. This would decrease the number of sectors from 256 to 216. If you wanted more sectors, you could do 7x7x7 for a total of 343 instead.

This would just make the space feel much more real. I know eventually there is a plan to expand the universe and this would totally be cool to go along with that. I'm not sure if it would be too hard to make a 3D system for plotting courses and hitting storms. If not, this would be a very cool long-term goal that could really add a lot to the feeling of realism in VO.

Related to this, a 3D sector layout would also be a step closer to making it possible to actually travel from one sector to another without magically warping. Maybe the animation sequence could eventually be changed to show you just moving really fast past all the stuff in space and ending up in another sector. EVE has this and it makes everything feel really connected. A 3D layout would allow for this kind of travel, although it seems like it would really take an overhaul of the entire game to do this, so I'm not holding my breath about it.

Even if animated warp traveling visuals are too far-fetched to ever be implemented, just the inital 3D sector layout suggestion doesn't seem like too far of a stretch for the VO game engine.

Unfortuanately, being a human with two working eyes, I base my reality through visuals. I think that making the nav-map into a cube has some worthwhile benefits.

Making sectors 3D can open many tactical possibilities, like positioning forces in an advantageous way to perform an attack. The way it is now, you can position them anywhere one jump away from the battlefield --- if they jump in at the same time, they all arrive at the same time and even more or less at the same spot. That`s practically 2D --- but not exactly that because you can surround some place in 2D and then move in from different directions which is something you can`t do in VO.

Go for a 3D cube design (7x7x7+) which assumes that the cubes are only an artificial means to make navigation easier rather than that they define somehow seperated areas. Add in-cube navigation and in-cube jumps and set a limit on how far a ship can jump with one jump, and there you are: You get large systems that are actually 3D and actually feel like that.

Different ships (or engines or energy cells) could even have different jump capabilities ... Wormholes could be in-system as a means to shorten long distances that would otherwise require a lot of jumps.

The system map could very well remain the same since it`s only an overview, so things won`t look nasty from lines everywhere.

Hm, add some radar stuff so that ships can be found within a sector, maybe by deployable radar relays or forwarding radar information from friendly ships or ships in a group, or from friendly stations. Such information would not appear on the radar screens but in the navigational map. Pirates might invent small senders that can be shot towards a ship to stick to the hull to reveal the position of a ship for some time.

if I wana go to I-9 I click I-9

How am I goan go to C-C'-3 by clicking? It's inside the cube...

Interesting if somewhat very complicated.

The cube is in fact a series of 2-d girds, layered on top of one another. The angle can be maneuvered so that you can click on the desired square on any dimension.

You could also just enter a nav-point as x, y, and z, typing 317, for example. Add a third layer (eventually more layers) of cubes for in-cube navigation, and you could navigate down to one meter. Maybe stay metric, so it`s 10x10x10 cubes in a system, 10x10x10 cubes in each layer of cubes until the size of one cube is 1x1x1 or 10x10x10 or 100x100x100 meters. Add the layer level to coordinates, and you get layer/x/y/z, like 20/3/1/7, to specify a point.

What`s the size of a whole system in meters x, y, z? Hence, how much layers would we need, and how much accuracy? An accuracy of 1000m may be enough, that leaves a lot of room to spawn ships somewhere within a cube they jump to.

The concept of a 3D map works very well in Frontier and EVE. To mention a few. And, to reply to a two year old comment, "cool" factor is enough ;-) Graphical cool factor is one of the things VO still lacks, and needs, even though it might be low priority.

I agree completely, even if it's just "stacking" certain existing sectors together and making a more depth layered shape. I don't think it's necessary to create a whole CUBE for most systems anyway. Systems without a center though, could have a deeper shape. I think that most systems, while mostly flat, need some 3d to them, even if it's only a couple of layers of sectors, with a few outlying sectors...

The main idea though is this, don't have systems with exactly equal # of sectors, and don't have them all flat. Each system should be unique, and interesting. It should be more fun to navigate. That pretty much sums it up...