Are there games in the open world with a round earth (map)?

Question

C++ / C#

Are there any games that has a round earth instead of a flat earth? How is it implemented?
I want to create an open world game that won't have a map edge (because the map will be round) but will (probably) be limited in height

Answer 1

There are many games with such worlds: No Man's Sky, Super Mario Galaxy, Planetary Annihilation. The developers of No Man's Sky recently held a presentation about their generation technologies. There is a short YouTube video about Super Mario Galaxy . The developers of Planetary Annihilation even have their own video blog , where a lot of technical issues were discussed.

Answer 2

Final Fantasy VII, VIII, IX, Xenogears
World map. On it you can walk, move on various vehicles, both land and sea and air.
(Ships, aircraft, airships, cars, trains, walking robots, mounts)
You can see how it looks on the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSakKaSt8Gc
https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=6H33wWK75i4
(FFVIII, run and fly)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFFYIShyPLs
(watch from 4:20 - Xenogears, we go by sea and by land)
All these games have the same engine world map. There is no edge of the map, there is a height limit ("ceiling"), the place in FF VIII, where according to the plot they fly into space, is made on scripts and the world map engine does not use.
The player can also control the camera (zoom and rotate the camera) on the world map.
The flight over the horizon was made very beautifully for 2000-2001. Light, sunset/sunrise are played out (you can fly towards the Sun), and the very moment that the Earth is round is clearly felt in the process.

Answer 3

just make a round "flat" card and reaching one edge, teleport to the opposite. The main thing is that the landscape matches.

Answer 4

First of all, flight simulators. I know that due to the scale of the Earth, they have to deal with float errors: if the Earth is 12,000 km across, then the low-order unit is half a meter.
The first X-COM had a round earth, but the flights were on a loxodrome. But in the open source remake of 2014, flights are already in a big circle.
God Simulators by Peter Molyneux: Populous, Black and White. Perhaps other god simulators (for example, Spore - did not check).
I'm talking about a spherical map, not a pipe / torus.
And so - I would warn against a spherical earth with an open world. 1) Distances (global map with accelerated time or without time does not count). 2) Navigation around the world (including the concept of "north"), minimap projection. 3) At some point, you need to wrap up and roll out the game, and at some point, issue an addon. It will be hard. By the way, in all the mentioned games the world is either closed, or much more than one planet.
PS My definition of an open world: a game that gives relative freedom of action and movement, but the local area where the player / group operates is much smaller than the world. In a closed world, on the contrary, the participant operates practically all over the “world”, quickly moving from one area to another. There are also borderline cases: the huge coast of the new Hitman - open world or closed?

Answer 5

Spore, for example.

Answer 6

With a ball, the problem is that you can’t stretch a regular square or hexagonal grid on it.
Games where it didn't hurt.
1) ufoai global map honest globe
2) Planetary Annihilation
3) freeciv tor topology setup (tor)
I will dwell on freeciv separately. Since this is a turn-based strategy, a regular grid is essential. As I said, the sphere cannot be tiled, but there is such a figure as a torus (donut) with which there are no problems.

Answer 7

To the games already mentioned above, you can look at Astroneer, Universim, and of course the planets in the Kerbal Space Program, Empyrion - Galactic Survival, Space Engineers.

Answer 8

Space engineers have full support for planets with a normal flight between them. If you are interested in how it is implemented - the game has open sources.