Well, it's a new era for transcendence indeed! I thought it was amazing that the topology could be put in extensions. I thought the new material in the game made transcendence more fun than ever before.
I staggered around laughing in glee because the custom topology functions George added blew my mind, and made 099 more than the upgrade of my dreams.
Little did I know that buried in a new simple element for dockscreens was the means to an absolutely miraculous new way to view the networks.
This is a piece of conceptual art that I made for the new network graphics project. This isn't really much more than eye candy atm, however I think you will be able to see the gist of what is going to be happening:
This is a rough representation of what a vanilla game topology star layout would look like in a total overview of the network. The dockscreens are limited to 600 x 400 images, so getting all the network in can be a little tough.
It won't really be necessary to fit all the network into one shot, it's just nice.
Now, each of the little star tiles can be positioned as layers- I will be adding in little lines to represent the gate links later. I am putting together more name tags to throw in there- they will even change to match the system names!
The yellow circle around one star is meant to demonstrate the "You are Here" feature.
I have found a fast and easy way to create these maps and am working out the code required to do the layering and the revealing of the map as you progress, so with a little more time and a lot of luck we will soon be able to 'see' the star network.
I am also making the little star tiles to match the star color in the game, and binary systems will be shown, and so on. I think that a closer zoom with larger stars would be easy to add in, where we can use some divisions based on the map area- giving a larger topology a sort of multi-charted viewing set up that would allow map sections to be more colorful and impart more information, perhaps.
For the usage I intend with the navigation computer this visual effect will be in addition to the already very capable list representation so that we can have lots of navigation fun. Yay!
This teaser has been brought to you by:
(*shoots the maze to put it down for good)
