The Making Of Feudums
III. View levels
As we intend to give you insight into the project, Derek has just started a somewhat technical topic about The Making of FEUDUMS. If you're interested to learn about techie black magic and fascinating technical dilemmas, you may want to follow it!
Hi all,
Today I'm going to write about the different zooming levels. The Feudums uses a hexa tiled map, (for details, see the previous article.) The content of these tiles are different. It could be only the ground like fields, a forest or a lake, but it can also bear improvements - a military building, a farm, a settlement, etc.
When the player wants to deal with a specific improvement, for example changing the behaviour of an element, the map shows the details of the tile and the whole map zooms in to the most detailed view. In this level, a context sensitive panel floats from the right side containing the available functions, and the left side panel bears the details of the selected element.
The next view level is the feudum view, when the tiles that belong to a feudum are displayed. It is a dynamic view because it depends on the shape of the feudum and the number of the tiles. It can be a narrow and long shape or just a bunch of tiles in the middle, the view controller sets the view to display every tile in the feudum.
The view above this is the strategic view. In this level the player can see further tiles, typically the area a unit can reach or has influence over it. The animations are still working so the view is not dead even at this height.
The last and the highest view in the game is the overview. It provides a rather symbolic presentation of the elements which are distributed over a few layers. These layers can be switch on and off depending on the intention of the player.
The change between the views is easy and immediate. A flick with the mouse wheel or a pinch or spread gesture on tablets. It is a seamless way to keep the focus on the elements the player wants to follow or look at, or get away from the unique elements and get a high level view.
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