I am in the process of developing a truly open world game where the map is about the size of Earth’s. I am trying to create the map but I have no idea how to do it. Well, I have an idea for a method of creating the map, but no idea on how to actually execute it.
IDEA: The world is an earth-sized planet that has randomly generated environments. It has a diameter of 3959 sq mi. I want to make the actual map on a sphere so that it will be realistic. My concept of putting a map there involves creating the actual sphere and all of its polygons, then unfolding it to create a net. All the location data will now be on that 2D map, like coordinates. With this approach, I would have a 2D map of the world with zero distortion.
In short, I want a net of a huge geodesic sphere to serve as the 2D map of the world without having to put the entire thing on a sphere, because that might be too much. How do I do this?