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Comment by hiccuphippo | Hacker News Reader

Very cool. Doesn't seem like the best way to play Mario but it would be awesome for games like Fire Emblem or Civilization.

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Civilization done in this way would be really, really cool. So cool I'm surprised it isn't already a thing. Imagine a City Skylines-style game done like this! I wonder if there is some technical reason this isn't done more, I would be way more into a board-game style approach than the motion-sickness inducing first person perspective most VR games take. I know the Vision Pro's primary MO is this "spatial computing" AR approach, but surely there are ways of accomplishing this without requiring an almost $4000 device, right?

It's just not cost effective to add VR to your games for a small handful of users.

There's a VR version of Civilization though

Exclusive to Meta (unfortunately), there is Triangle Strategy: https://www.meta.com/experiences/triangle-strategy/534013047...

Control is a bit dodgy, I kind of feel like it didn't quite commit to either the VR or the controller-like controls, but it's perfectly playable and is an interesting angle on things.

yea you should be able to just map out a table surface and play a game of Civilization on it, seems like a no brainer.

In civ it is part of the game not knowing which part of the big map are you in. If you provide space for the eventual map and it is respected, then you will instantly know which corner of the world is yours. Or, if you pick your start location in your room, some distant leaders may end up in the cupboard or the pavement outside. Panning and zooming the growing map as you advance sounds necessary.

Easy option is to make it a globe then that you could spin around.

Cartography would have some comments about the easiness of stretching a usual planar civ map over a sphere.

The normal non-vr versions already solve part of this: The overall size of the world is part of the initial game set up but that doesn't really reveal your position until you manage to uncover an edge in the fog of war. So you wouldn't don't need to change the zoom any, just translate the view to keep it centered as the player discovers new tiles until they discover ones on a boundary which anchors it.

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