Replacement Geoscape

Is it possible to mod in a globe instead of the default map? Or maybe a different map, like I'm defending a futuristic Mars or some sort of ant colony.

You wouldn't be able to replace it with a globe though unless you have access to the source code and probably more than a little coding talent.

I am not sure how the game decides what areas are viable for bases and missions, as opposed to seas etc where missions can't take place.

If those areas are controlled by one of the editable xml files then you would be able to replace the game map with any other flat image and alter the playable areas accordingly.

If it is in the source code then you would be able to play on any image as long as the playable areas on that image roughly correspond to the land masses of the planet Earth...

Well unless you have the aforementioned access and talent to alter the source.

Yeah. Nation borders/funding is another thing you have to consider.

Yeah but it would be funny to make up names for my various ant hills/mars domes/sea anemonies. I'd probably change the name of the currency too. Sucks about the globe thing, though.

It would be a great effort (means hundreds of files to be edited), but yes, you should be able to turn the earth into mars if you'd like to.

The globe visualization would be impossible to mod in without having access to the source code, sorry.

Do you happen to know if the playable areas are editable then?

I was assuming it was set in the file used to set which tilesets are used in an area but haven't looked too deeply into it.

You can edit playable areas (the continents), with just the limit that continents have to be 10 as in the current geoscape setup. (You can probably hide one by setting up an empty texture mask, but I never tried that myself)

Btw, if you open the folder /assets/earth/continentmasks you'll see some textures that are used as masks to get the continents in the geoscape management. For example, you can see au.png, au_edges_quarter.png, au_edges_quarter_mz.png for australia. If you edit those files you can draw the continents as you like.

You'll also have to modify files in the funding subfolder, and then the tilesetmask.png and townmask.png (these two files have to be the sum of all the others, meaning that an area colured in au.png, saf.png, .. HAS to be non-transparent even in those files)(little note, townmask.png isn't still there, will be from next version).

Then obiouvs modifications are needed in strings.xml.