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What a phenomenal writeup. What I'd really like to understand about SupCom is how the zoom in/out views are so smooth and seamless. At one point during the be

What a phenomenal writeup. What I'd really like to understand about SupCom is how the zoom in/out views are so smooth and seamless. At one point during the beta I remember talking to a dev on IRC who told me the zoom was very challenging in this game, and that a novel approach had been devised and successfully implemented. The scale of the range between micro and macro views in SupCom is unlike anything else I've encountered. For example, you can start zoomed in on a specific character on a ship, and then you can zoom out all the way until you can see the entire map. And the whole interaction is for all intents and purposes seamless and smooth as the view changes. It's akin to the intro part of the film "Contact" where it zooms out from the Earth all the way into the deep universe. Such a gem of a game -- too bad it takes so long to play a round! (3-6 hours+)

nacs 11y ago
This is mentioned in the linked article but a lot of the rendering work is done in the Level of Detail system that is standard in most game engines now. As the player camera moves further from an object, lower resolution versions of the 3D model replace the default high resolution model. Supcom takes this a step further, and at the furthest zoom levels, switches to a 2D sprite (a single quad with texture applied) for unit meshes. Other games have implemented this sort of thing now, like Planetary Annihilation, which was created by some of the original SupCom developers (warning: don't buy PA unless it's at a severe discount however as it's buggy, has poor game balance, no good single player campaign and a tiny multiplayer community). The Kerbal Space Program game's devblog also contains some interesting writeups regarding this kind of thing, like this one: http://kerbalspace.tumblr.com/post/9056986834/on-quadtrees-and-why-they-are-awesome http://kerbalspace.tumblr.com/post/9056986834/on-quadtrees-a...

nacs 11y ago

This is mentioned in the linked article but a lot of the rendering work is done in the Level of Detail system that is standard in most game engines now. As the player camera moves further from an object, lower resolution versions of the 3D model replace the default high resolution model. Supcom takes this a step further, and at the furthest zoom levels, switches to a 2D sprite (a single quad with texture applied) for unit meshes. Other games have implemented this sort of thing now, like Planetary Annihilation, which was created by some of the original SupCom developers (warning: don't buy PA unless it's at a severe discount however as it's buggy, has poor game balance, no good single player campaign and a tiny multiplayer community). The Kerbal Space Program game's devblog also contains some interesting writeups regarding this kind of thing, like this one: http://kerbalspace.tumblr.com/post/9056986834/on-quadtrees-and-why-they-are-awesome http://kerbalspace.tumblr.com/post/9056986834/on-quadtrees-a...