Cloth Map to Full 3D UI ideas

It would be rather neat to zoom in on the paper map and suddenly find your view blocked by clouds. Zooming in further will push your view through the clouds until you have a birds eye view of (stylized) realistic terrain. Clouds are only one method that might work, but I'm sure you guys could think up other methods of transition.

I thought of something.   Perhaps, if you are in full out map mode and you switch between different plains of existance or to the underground map (assuming they exist), another map is literrally rolled out over the existing one (or the map gets rolled up and carried off screen).  alternatively the screen could just slide over to another part of whatever table it is on to show another map, though I like the rolling cloth idea more.  (the animation should be quite speedy)

I'm not entirely sure what that would require in relation to system requirements.  I know SD wants to have the cloth screen be laptop friendly, so obviously we wouldn't want some super complex shader action caused by the map physically being rolled up (like where you could see the map and icons bending with the cloth), but maybe some sort of video overlay might work.   The problem that causes though if is the video overlay cannot be supported in the resolution used by whatever laptop you might have bizzaro streching effects.  I think with proper adjustment (namely the inclusion of several cloth roll animations for different resolutions) you could still do it that way, but again.  I'm just brainstorming.

Or you COULD have the cloth be folded up, and just make it in such a way that nothing too graphically fancy will be present enough to be missed on low settings (that seems to be the best option in my mind).

That being said, just having the other world map be burned into the cloth anew would be simple enough and still get the job done.  That is how I originally figured it would happen.

There is something similar in Galciv 2: the map is in 3D, but if you zoom out, things reduce and finally switch to tactical view where everything is icon. And the level at which the transition is made is parametrable by the user. And the game is playable (you can easily spot tiny fighters when there are icons) at tactical level.

So I expect Elemental to work the same way.

You could try to grab a GC2 demo and see how this works.

I wouldn't want my view to be obscured at any point while zooming in or out. For one thing, what if I want to zoom out to a level in which there are clouds in my face? Disaster. But potentially even worse is suddenly losing sight of the map would disorienting. You'd have to find points of interest all over again. I'd rather it work just like in GC2; although there is a difference - there wasn't a 3D environment to deal with. Nonetheless a simple fade in/out would suffice for me.

I actually think this would be the best way to do it. But rather than having the the maps being 'burned' into the cloth, they should use an ink effect! Have the old map ink dissolve while the new map ink appears, as if seeping into the paper. There's really no need for fancy animations that would be both disruptive and potentially problematic on some systems. Also, having one map fade in while the other fades out would give you a brief moment to view relative positions.

Oh oh - what about being able to overlay one map over another, in different colors? It might be too busy and confusing, though. Maybe you could choose only certain objects to overlay, like I could choose to overlay all settlements, or all units, etc in the Astral Plane over my regular worldmap.

Here is how I picured it. 

You can go as deep as they make it and at the highest level it appears you are looking at a world map, but as you pan further out you actually are transformed into the channelers scrying room.  In there could be maps, trophies of actual other worlds the channeler has conquered.

If there are additional planes, from here you might get some voice acting to come into play, such as "Show me the underworld.", and the scrying device then takes you to the top most point of that map and you can further dive deeper in, or continue to look at other areas.

I'm with ya, except the voice acting.   Underworld would work if that is all they have.   But if they have multiple plains Master of Magic style, they will probebly have some sort of world editor.  And since there hasn't actually been a named world yet, you'd probebly name all your plains of existance.  So a voice actor couldn't call out its name, because you (the player) would have made the name up.

Yeah, ink effect would work.    When I said "burned", I just imagined a little magical swirly like what is used in Master of Magic to add spells to the spell book.

You could always plug in Microsoft Sam or one of his cousins. Artificial voices have improved greatly and there are some out there that are highly realistic.

I don't really see the point, to be honest. What functionality would it add? I hope we'll be able to switch between planes without having to zoom all the way out. Having to constantly zoom in and out and lose track of where you were to switch from plane to plane would be maddening.