I’m interested in starting a new hobby project that’s basically going to be a civ game, but I want to be able to do two things. First is being able to wrap the grid of the map into a sphere to see the world as a world. Second, while the grid is flat like a map, to have the grid repeat itself right-left like you would have on any map projection, so that when you move the camera left or right, the map seems infinite.
My intuition is that I should learn to do this in python or something as a script rather than a blueprint, But I wanted to ask you guys if you have any thoughts on how best to go about this?
to answer your title: a voxel plugin.
To answer your post.
Well, if the game is similar to civ, faking the infinity can be as easy as using a single plane with a water shader that moves with the camera.
This has to be done at runtime obviously. Python doesn’t help there.
swapping or porting from left to right can be done with a simple teleport. You just repeat the map left/right to give the Illusion that you continue on. In reality you just go back to 0,0. Because things look the same the effect should not be noticeable (never seen it be noticeable tbh).
For the terrain and the sphere wrap. It’s complicated. And no python won’t help here either if you intend to transition from flat map to sphere.
It will have to be runtime, not something you cook beforehand.
As seen in “from ants to other space” there are material shaders that can (sort of obviously) distort a flat mesh into a sphere.
these run as a material, and displacement on a material is run on the GPU. This means that a displaced material offers no collision.
in practical terms you are faking a sphere, any object placed on the map would remain at its flat location.
Because of that, maybe a transition into a pre-made globe that you just wrap with a render texture of the current terrain is a much more amicable solution for both you and the engine.
I would assume you need the ability to grab and drag as well as the ability to click a point on the map and be taken into the local view.
That would be near impossible using a material shader, since clicks wouldn’t occur on the actual item.
If you really want to make a civ like game i would suggest you learn C++ first. Blueprint second.
python is easy after you pick up any C based language.