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IDProjectCategoryLast Update
0025384AI War 2Gameplay IdeaJul 8, 2021 3:52 pm
ReporterChris_McElligottPark Assigned ToChris_McElligottPark  
Severityminor 
Status assignedResolutionopen 
Summary0025384: Consider drawing ownership mapping on the galaxy map.
Descriptionis the ability to calculate a concave hull around a series of points, and then further turn that into a mesh that can be drawn. What's the purpose of this? Well, if we had calculated the flood-fill ownership for each region of stars, we could paint the color of the territory in the background on the galaxy map. Now, the downside is that this would naturally be very thin and single stars would look strange, and so on. But we have a minimum distance that planets are allowed to be from one another, and I could just add in points to the north, south, east, and west of each of those that is half the minimum distance. That will create a buffer zone around all of them, although with a lot of harsh angles.

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/modeling/geometry-algorithms-61875

That preview image is actually kind of a perfect example of what I mean. Imagine each point is a planet. Now imagine that I added the buffer around that, as described.
I'm not sure how much this would add; if it would be a huge thing, or not a great use of time.
I suspect that it would be problematic on many maps, since there are oversized distances between star areas that would be strangely empty.
If there was a cluster of AI stuff, and one planet in the middle of it that is mine, then my area should protrude outward ideally almost to the border, or all the way TO the border, of the AI stuff.
So in many ways, this sort of convex hull algorithm is not enough on its own. The ability to triangulate points is nice, but that's about it.
Possibly more relevant is if we think of the space involved here as one big rectangle.

If we take the approach of "the galaxy is a rectangle," then we could basically use some sort of grid of points, and first assign all of the points that are touched by the convex hull to that faction. Then gradually start expanding every region to adjacent cells at a constant rate. Any two areas that are far apart will eventually meet. And any areas that are outside all the bounds of all the hulls... I guess those could just be culled and not considered part of the rectangle at all.
X maps will generate quite a strange mess at times, with loads of owned areas stretching out in funky ways with that algorithm.
But it's similar to digger algorithms and other quasi-recursive procedural cave digging algorithms that I've done before.
Actually, come to that, I could really just use that sort of thing to begin with, except that it would fail to handle some of the contiguous cases.

Per StarKelp, possibly the AI doesn't actually draw its borders, and that's just an opacity of zero, so we're seeing only human and other faction territories as we go.
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Chris_McElligottPark

Jul 8, 2021 3:52 pm

administrator   ~0062353

StarKelp: The other idea would be to scale its colors up based on its known nonguard strength there.
So AI territory would light up when its on the move.

Badger: that would be a nice way to see where the AI forces were

Me: mind blown. That would be so useful.

Issue History

Date Modified Username Field Change
Jul 8, 2021 3:48 pm Chris_McElligottPark New Issue
Jul 8, 2021 3:49 pm Chris_McElligottPark Assigned To => Chris_McElligottPark
Jul 8, 2021 3:49 pm Chris_McElligottPark Status new => assigned
Jul 8, 2021 3:52 pm Chris_McElligottPark Note Added: 0062353