I've only played like old SNES games the last few years, but I guess it's hard to make the map look like a globe with that kind of technology, hence you'll have to imagine the world on the map being round and all edges connecting in some kind of twisted way instead. Like papier-maché on a balloon. (And extensive cutting.)
I probably missed the point by a mile though.
(The center of the map is one pole and the edges are another, do I win?)
no, that would be a solution, although if you mapped the earth like that it would look weird, and so would a compass :P
And when you ride that airship/dragon, what happens when you go off the north end of the map?
Oh, wait, I'm sorry, I thought you said it DOESN'T have an overworld. My bad.
I thought it didn't, but as I said, I never played the game very long (I got the three party members and I think I fought some kind of giant tiger boss or something, but that's it). I guess, as in Seiken Densetsu 3, the overworld doesn't show up in a navigable sense until later.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Creating a spherical map that doesn't have distortion or awkward patchwork seems mathematically cumbersome, not easy enough to be worth the benefits it would give.
EDIT: Then again, Populous The Beginning does it, and that's only a PSX game. To be honest...I'm not sure -how- it does it.
(The center of the map is one pole and the edges are another, do I win?)
It could work in theory, but as someone already said, you would get extreme distortions at the edges (because all the edges would in fact be one single point projected onto them).
As an additional note: Some JRPGs explicitly refer to things being "North" and "South", clearly referring to the upper edge of the map being "North" and the lower edge being "South". For example Dragon Warrior 7 makes explicit references to this.
Of course this introduces a huge logical gap. When you go out of the map from the North edge, you are basically teleported to the South edge. Clearly the game acts in its terminology like the world was spherical and the "poles" were at the upper and lower edges, but doesn't address this teleportation issue.
One could conceive a really far-fetched explanation that people in this toroidal planet, for whatever reason, have decided to map the planet's surface onto a rectangle and decided to call one of the division lines as the dividing line between "North" and "South", much like Earth has a Greenwich meridian which divides geographical coordinates into "East" and "West"
I think the idea of turning the North and South edges of the map into warp zones where you pick a direction and thereby choose where you end up (on the respective edges) is a bit closer to a realistic depiction of a sphere, and probably as close as you can get without introducing the distortions of an actual rectangular projection, in which higher latitutes are stretched out because smaller lines of latitude are made to fit in the same length.
Or you could go with a cylinder by having the top of the map link to the closest point on a separate, circle-shaped (or square shaped!) map, and similar for the bottom. Translations between the two areas would be inexact.
I think the idea of turning the North and South edges of the map into warp zones where you pick a direction and thereby choose where you end up (on the respective edges) is a bit closer to a realistic depiction of a sphere, and probably as close as you can get without introducing the distortions of an actual rectangular projection, in which higher latitutes are stretched out because smaller lines of latitude are made to fit in the same length.
Only if you don't mind that when you reach the north pole, you are suddenly teleported to the opposite side of the planet... :)
A mathematically correct depiction would be that when you go out of the upper edge, you appear again on the upper edge, but at a distance which is half of the total width of the world map (in other words, 180 degrees apart in the original coordinates).
I've spent a lot of time thinking about this problem. I'm kind of a dork that way...
I don't think it would have been too much trouble for them to use a cube as a projection of a sphere: they could have had 6 maps placed that appear edge to edge and rotated as appropriate (If you rotated the map information and not the graphical tiles, it should look just fine too). Having only one square rotated 180 degrees along one axis and looped along the other has already been suggested, and any of the platonic solids could have been used at least on 3D systems. Using a geodesic dome also comes to mind.
On the other hand, I've also been thinking about how one might have programmed a spherical map in 2-D on the older systems given the convention that north is always "up." Obviously you could never walk past the north or south poles. For the rest, I figure something could have been done using differently sized tile rows and a system to omit or draw certain tiles as necessary to make different rows sync. I imagine you'd try to put the seems in very large oceans, mountain ranges or fields to make this less noticeable. I'm sure it could be done, but it would be a lot of trouble.
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Personally, I think the best (or maybe easiest) solution would be to use a mercator projection, tile it like such, and give the player the ability to rotate the map to orient themselves as needed.
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
I don't think I've ever seen a game with an overworld map that suggests a spherical planet. Even in Secret Of Mana I'm pretty sure if you go over the north end of the map you show up at the south. You can certainly fly to a place that's at all four corners of the map.
Civilization games try to account for the shape of our planet by disallowing travel over the poles, so you can go around the world but that top is just off-limits. This makes the worlds more like a cylinder. Even then Civ IV allows you to optionally select "fantasy world" as a map option that makes it so the world is a torus. I figure the name "fantasy world" is somewhat a reference to Final Fantasy games.
I also recall older Might & Magic Games (III through V) having distinctly flat worlds. It was even a plot point in Might & Magic: Clouds Of Xeen and Might & Magic: Darkside Of Xeen. To get the full ending of the merged game, World Of Xeen, you needed to unite the worlds, and during the ending the two sides form a globe.
Ferret Warlord, your tiling is a bit off, because if you go straight through the South Pole on the 30W longitude line, you will end up leaving on the 150E longitude line; please look at my image on the first page for the correct tiling.Warp wrote:
arflech wrote:
I think the idea of turning the North and South edges of the map into warp zones where you pick a direction and thereby choose where you end up (on the respective edges) is a bit closer to a realistic depiction of a sphere, and probably as close as you can get without introducing the distortions of an actual rectangular projection, in which higher latitutes are stretched out because smaller lines of latitude are made to fit in the same length.
Only if you don't mind that when you reach the north pole, you are suddenly teleported to the opposite side of the planet... :)
A mathematically correct depiction would be that when you go out of the upper edge, you appear again on the upper edge, but at a distance which is half of the total width of the world map (in other words, 180 degrees apart in the original coordinates).
Anyway you could make the maps more realistic by having all users who walk up the top of the map end up walking down from the top of the map, halfway around it, like this:
The top half is backwards. It should be flipped and shifted.
One thing to note, though. This mechanic isn't limitted to jRPGs nor was it invented by jRPGs. I remember playing the first King's quest and the map worked like this. (Which is even weirder because even at that point Daventry was not seen as the entire world.) All of other text based King's Quests had a loop in one direction (usually North-South) and barriers in other directions. I'm also sure there might be a few text adventures that loop in both directions.
Regarding the characters using cardinal directions: they need some way to navigate, and cardinal directions work just as well as any. As long as everyone agrees which way is North, it works, even if the world is shaped like a donut. I'm not sure why you think poles are needed to use those terms.
3D shapes aren't 2D ones ;) That's just the way things roll when you start using projections.
No how about a game that takes place on a hyperbolic plane?
3D shapes aren't 2D ones ;) That's just the way things roll when you start using projections.
No how about a game that takes place on a hyperbolic plane?
Technically the surface of a sphere is a 2-dimensional manifold...just one with positive curvature, unlike the plane or torus.
However, if you're talking about embedding into Euclidean space, the sphere needs at least 3 dimensions, and it can be embedded isometrically there, while the torus can be embedded in 3 dimensions but needs 4 to be embedded isometrically.
It means that the metric is preserved in the embedding. If you regard a torus as a rectangle that wraps in both directions, when you embed it in 3-space, as you move across the rectangle you will in general move at a different speed along the 3-space embedding, so the metric is not preserved here.
also any embedding of the torus in 3 dimensions includes points of positive curvature and points of negative curvature
while it is possible to embed the torus in 4 dimensions so that all points have zero curvature
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Most RPG world maps adhere to the Law of Cartographical Elegance, meaning that the worlds could be projected onto a sphere without much worry. It's just that the programmers were too lazy to bother making it spherical.
Of course, there are a few cases where the world map is blatantly toridal:
Pictured: Final Fantasy 2 (J)
Nach wrote:
I also used to wake up every morning, open my curtains, and see the twin towers. And then one day, wasn't able to anymore, I'll never forget that.
Seems a lot of the folks on TV tropes don't know what they're talking about under "exception."
It is true that most J-RPG maps lend themselves to just about any topology in that they tend to be a bunch of continents sitting in a single, vast world ocean.
FF2J really could be a poster child for the whole problem though... Maybe it would work if the upper right and lower left corners were poles and the two land bridges attaching to the desert continent were switched so that they properly wrapped around a diagonal equator... Might be undesirable from a gameplay perspective though.
The following wikipedia article has some spiffy diagrams:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface
Why would left/right be able to loop but not up/down?
The earth is a sphere, if the sphere has a 1 on top, and a 2 on bottom, rolling it over will reverse that.
Pictured: Final Fantasy 2 (J)
