Creating 3D World Globe / Game World

Unity Engine
1

Hey Guys, i am new to Unity3D, but already have a fairly challenging task on my hands, i need to create a game world similar to that of the old classic “Populous -The Beginning”.

For those not familiar with this title here is a youtube video of gameplay: (The video is very long, but if you watch minutes 1 - 2 you should have a pretty good idea of what i am talking about)

I guess at this point i am looking for some advise, as to how to implement such an interactive 3D world Globe.

Some first glance challenges are:

  • Creating a sphere and mapping a material to it doesn’t seem to work, since the end result is a flat map, where as i need the terrain and all constructed buildings and characters to be displayed on the map real time. (Unless there is a way to map a 3 dimensional texture to the sphere. In other words i am looking for a way to create “Terrain” in Unity and make it in the form of a Sphere. The only other semi-feasible alternative i can think of is creating a 3D model in 3dMAX and importing it in to Unity as the game world and then attaching some scripts for on click rotation using force

  • Ability to dynamically render “Corrections” to the environmental terrain, for example when a character manipulates the terrain in some way, like creating land surface on water or leveling out the terrain…etc. Placing objects seems to be a fairly straight forward approach with dynamic instantiation of prefabs, but making corrections to the landscape, is more challenging.

  • Ability to connect to some form of a DB to store / retrieve game data and save game progress.

  • Creating Camera movement control to mimic the Populous game cam movement.

Again as i previously mentioned i am a total newbie when it comes to Unity, hence some of my questions , challenges and assumptions might seem silly to some, but non the less i am determined to learn, so please do share any insight you have to offer, even if its just a link to a good resource…thanks in advance :slight_smile:

Uni-Noob

2

Don’t know what to answer. Too many questions on to many massive subjects. If you’re not sure how’d you would go about building a game like this from code (Unity’s terrain will be no help) then suggest to your project lead that they look at hiring a seasoned 3D programmer.

You could try to pre-build models in a 3D authoring app and import them, but I can’t see how you’d get dynamic terrain from static models. Best solution is just to write a new terrain system for your game then you can make it as flexable and dynamic as you need it to be. There’s a lot of different discussion on the net about programming game worlds like that, search for game programming spore like worlds in Google and you should stumble across a few.

For the database stuff see the Unity Wiki or Asset Store.