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The worldmap

Started by Crewman6 Oct 16, 2000 at 8:31 PM 2 replies 250+ views
Original Post
Crewman6
Crewman6
Well I''m currently designing a game and I am now on the worldmap, I need some opinions, I am iether going to have just one huge worldmap where the player can go basically anywhere and do all sorts of things or have it done in different parts or hubs acording to the plot. Now what''s better and what won''t discourage the player.
Authustian
Authustian
i personaly like one big map
but thats just me.



-------------------------------------------------
Don't take life too seriously, you''ll never get out of it alive. -Bugs Bunny
-------------------------------------------------Don't take life too seriously, you''ll never get out of it alive. -Bugs Bunny
MK42
MK42
One big map is cool and easy, but not if it doesn''t fit into memory. For example Ultima 9 was just one huge map, but if you started running in a direction it slowed to a crawl, because the harddrive was shoveling in data into memory (I have 128 MB, that oughta be enough for quite a bit of data).

That''s where I would have said "OK, so load a few seconds during the game and give me a responsive game instead!" *That* can really discourage a gamer.

Or, take a look at Half-Life ... lot''s of small maps, but it only needed to load 5-10 seconds ... that wasn''t bad at all I didn''t get discouraged by that.

Another example, StarTrek Voyager: Elite Force. It had smallish maps *and* long loading times. This game almost drove me insane ... Wait 1 minute for a level to load, which you''ll only spend 10 minutes (or less!!!) in. Or, when you load a savegame from that level, it doesn''t try to reuse the level data ... I mean, even Deus Ex manages to load a 25 MB savegame faster than StarTrek... That is bad.

I guess, my point is ... one huge map is cool, if you can pull it off with a reasonable usage of resources. If you can''t, then better stick to smaller maps and try keeping the load-times low.

MK42

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