Map sizes and loading...

Don''t know exactly how I''d do it. Depends on the purpose.

Let''s take some examples. First off Final Fantasy Tactics. It''s an strategy game, so the map is small and not much of a concern (let''s forget for a moment it runs on the PSX).

Now another example: Ultima 8. It had some big maps, but they were loaded once at a time. Suppose you were in Tenebrae, "downtown". If you wanted to go east or west, the screen would fade, and the new map would be loaded(the loading of maps was extremely fast, I think they just fade the screen to make a cool transition). Also, the maps did vary greatly in size.

My final example: Ultima 7(or online, for that matter). It had one map, and that''s all. When the player moved, aditional map chunks were loaded(I am convinced it had some kind of caching system, because the hard disk acess would decrease over time). If you used this system you could scale the amount of information loaded every time based on the computer''s memory.

As for loading npc data and graphics I really have no clue, haven''t thought about it yet...

Gaiomard Dragon
-===(UDIC)===-

That''s how I do my map loading. I have one map that can be any size. I always subdivide my maps into 256x256 tile chunks. As a player walks into a area for the first time, I load it into memory from disk. I then cache it into my caching structure. Basically it''s a list sorted by priority. The chunks that are most frequently visited are near the top. You can adjust the size of the cache to meet tailor the machines available memory etc. Objects, static and non static objects are handled the same way but in another map. I also cache my tile and object graphics with the same system.

You can check it out here