Display your world as a spinning globe

[thisispete]

I'm not sure if this is the right forum for this, but I figured I would post it here since the best use of this tip would be in stories and tales.

I've been toying around with an application called The GIMP (Graphical Image Manipulation Program), which you can download for free at download.com . Anyway, there is a feature in it which allows you to animate any image as a spinning globe. I fooled around with the minimap from my current game and this is what I came up with.

One important thing to note is that to appear as a perfect globe, the original image must be a perfect square, so I resized the canvas in Paint and filled in the white bands with black (once the entire world has been mapped, you may wish to fill in those areas with ocean blue).

Anyway, here's the original image I used

And here it is modified for globification.

 

[CoolioVonHoolio]

i dont think this is the right forum for this...

 

[Steel General]

No it should probably be in the Creation/Customization Forum but its still pretty cool.

 

[LulThyme]

It does look pretty good, although to display it on a cylinder would be the accurate thing to do...

 

[Blaze Injun]

Hey,

Makes me ized.



Blaze Injun

 

[Puppeteer]

Hey, cool! I guess I sorta knew Gimp could do that but never tried it and never thought about using it for CivIII. I took your map and streched it to fill up the globe. Then I decided we need polar ice caps. After some experimentation I used this base image (minus the black outline which was added for clarity):

and came up with this globe:

It could certainly use a little more tweaking, but this is really cool. Thanks!

This thread will probably get moved somewhere under Creation and Custimization.

@LulThyme, actually globe-to-cylinder-to-flat mapping was used a lot throughout maritime history. And doing it a certain way allowed you to plot globe-accurate courses using a straightedge. I was reading about this recently but forget where. But if you really want a cylinder, use the Map-to-Cylinder function and alter the Y axis rotation for each frame to continue and make the animation (the animate spinning globe script repeatedly maps to sphere while rotating the Y axis):

EDIT: Detail notes: Original map was 230x106. I stretched it to 230x155 then enlarged canvas to 230x230 and painted the polar caps white. Then used the Script-Fu -> Animators -> Spinning Globe... option from the menus. I used 20 frames and 64 colors. When saving to GIF I used 150ms or 200ms timing.

 

[Puppeteer]

By the way, I tried keeping the filesize small for my globe for posting here. If I up the colors to 255 (plus transparency), use 100 frames and 50ms delay I get a much cooler looking animation, but it's 814k bytes:

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads9/Puppeteer-globe5.gif

 

[thisispete]

@Puppeteer - that's a definite improvement. I used 15 frames on the one I created, it looked better at 24 frames - so one second would equal one day. 24 frames took the image over 100kb, though and although that is well within the upload limit, I try to keep images as compact as possible.

 

[rbis4rbb]

cool tip guys!!!

 

[thisispete]

And here is the final globe after a complete exploration of the world. I took the minimap, stretched it vertically by 150% and put in some polar regions.

This globe is 24 frames. I changed the direction of the spin to match Earth's too. I think this is probably the best quality you can get within reasonable limits, though a slower speed of rotation might be good (and is do-able)

 

[Puppeteer]

Looks very nice with the world revealed.

I'm in a weird mood this morning, and these are the result:

I tried erasing the polar caps, unstreching the map back to original size and making it a spinning cylinder but it turns into just a square that appears to be scrolling horizontally...very hard to tell it's supposed to be a cylinder. By the way I edited the animate globe script to make the cylinder. If anyone wants it I could post it, but basically you change a 1 to a 3 below ";mapping" and then edit the "spinning-globe" references to "spinning-cylinder".

 

[Chieftess]

That's pretty neat. I moved this to the Creation & Customization forum, since it's more of artwork than a story.

 

[viper275]

How exactly do you do this (what do you click on to get there?)

 

[tjedge1]

This is sweet. I think I'm going to start doing these when I start my scenarios.

 

[Pounder]

What does it look like in game. How to you use it.

 

[mrtn]

@Pounder: You don't use it in the game, it's just a nice gfx for stories and such.

 

[aaglo]

I've got even better program for that - pov-ray, where you can add a matching bump-map to it
... ok, you need also some image-editing program and a gif-animation tool...

But nevertheless, it's a fun feature (the rotating globe...)

 

[Goldflash]

*bangheadondesk* Make Work in Game! That bee coolio with whipped chesse, OG Loc!

 

[Puppeteer]

Work in-game? Hmmmm. Maybe possible, but I'm not starting on it.

How exactly do you do this (what do you click on to get there?)

In The GIMP, a free Photoshop-like program, here's what I do:

1: Scale the image into a square, leaving some white space at the top and bottom for ice caps if desired.

2: Make sure image is in RGB or Grayscale mode, not Indexed.

3: Script-Fu dropdown menu menu -> Animators -> Spinning Globe. You can select the # of frames and colors (up to 256, or 255 w/transparent background) there. Make selections and click OK.

4: When it's done you'll have a multi-layer image. File -> Save As... and give it a filename with the ".gif" extension; it will ask you if you want to merge layers or export as animation. Choose animation, and then enter the delay in milliseconds between animation frames and whether you want to loop the animation (yes).

 

[Chieftess]

That program seems to crash a lot in random places, I've noticed. (can't seem to go to the open file dialog without it crashing)