Globe Clicker 2 - Early Access

Globe Clicker 2 : in-development Early Access

This is a very early version of the sequel to the Xbox360 geographic quizz Globe Clicker. The features currently implemented are as follow :

• Flat world map from NASA satellite photos.
• The player is prompted a location, and can point anywhere on the map.
• The distance between the prompt and the answer is measured in miles or kilometers.
• The player can choose the location list to be Per-Continent, or Capitals only, or Unesco World Heritage sites only.

Planned features coming soon :

• The map will be presented on a 3D globe that the player can rotate and zoom.
• Night satellite photos, with big cities highly visible among the countryside with their lights.
• Country borders, with a setting to show or hide them.
• The player answer will be rated on distance and time, with points awarded, and a points threshold to reach for the next level.
• High-score list.
• Better visual feedback when the player chooses an answer.
• Sound effects.
• Full gamepad support and key rebinding.

Development philosophy

I will regularly push new versions of the game. You can expect 2 to 3 new builds per-week, with a rapid development schedule. I expect the development to be finished by mid February.

With this Early Access release, I am looking for player feedback, and showcasing the development in an open manner.

ChangeLog

Beta 2 - 2017-27-01

Better performance on graphic cards with less than 2GB of ram with compressed textures.

Textures are now baked from a lossless PNG source rather than a lossy JPG one.

Removed obsolete and irrelevant settings.

Beta 3 - 2017-28-01

Allow higher zoom level.

Higher resolution for satellite textures : now 2400 pixels per 30 latitude/longitude degrees.

Flags textured are baked as DDS RGBA for faster loading.

Removed obsolete and irrelevant shipped files.

Beta 3.1 - 2017-30-01

Fixed a bug where the first launch with an Intel GPU would crash.

Fixed a bug where the random prompted location in mode World Cities was always Los Angeles.

Beta 4 - 2017-30-01

Setup.exe creates a shortcut to Configurator.exe used to launch the debug-enabled version or the fail-safe settings.

Removed the level-of-details feature of the satellite textures because they already are mip-mapped.

Country borders now rendered as textures baked with custom 8-bit/pixel format.

Beta 5 - 2017-31-01

Alternate satellite textures : night mode.

Special inter-state borders for map type "USA".

Flag textures are now loaded on-demand rather than at start-time, which makes for a faster load time, and fewer VRAM load.

Default position for the location prompt is now bottom-left corner.

Beta 6 - 2017-02-08

Full support for the 3-dimensional Globe mode.

Projection mode can be changed on the fly during gameplay, from Flat Map to/from Globe.

New technique for rendering the path from the user choice to the correct answer.

Beta 6.4 - 2017-02-21

The path from the user choice to the prompted location is now the shortest path (interpolating on the globe projection rather than interpolating latitude-longitude coordinates).

Fixed a crash on initial load that happened with CPU i7-4700MQ and GPU Intel(R) HD Graphics 4600 - 4.0.0 - Build 9.18.10.3204