theWulfen 2 – Blog

A possible solution

Having thought about the problem I outlined in the post just now and having spoken to a mate, I think that I’m doing what many sole developers do and that is overcomplicating the problem.  Although the background of the game is that the game world is equivalent to the real world I shouldn’t be trying to shoehorn the game into real world physics.  One thing that makes the WoW world work as well as it does is that it is broken up into (large) chunks of land, mostly joined together with small pathways of land and bridges.  These zones also have level requirements and flight paths (instant teleportation).

So, I’m still going to aim for the rough land mass that I was going to, but it will be vastly smaller than I originally was contemplating.  As a note (more to me than anything else), traveling 1000 flat tiles would take 50 minutes – this is roughly 4 miles!

Oh, I keep forgetting to say that I’ve finally begun to code the travel aspect of the game, as with the rest of the game, using a combination of php and js it now loads up a 5×5 grid of tiles, caching them appropriatly.  The actual mechanism for moving the tiles is also in place and is far better than I original thought about doing it.  My next task is to configure it so that you can move in 8 directions and to load those tiles as necessary and remove the tiles that are no longer visible.  After that I need to start to think about putting in specific tile data to control the directions you can move in.  From there I can perform the necessary speed and performance testing and tweak the storage method of the data.

A Problem…

Ok, problem is perhaps too strong a word, but more of a challenge relating to the whole travel map part of w2.  I’ve done a few calculations so that I know potentially what scope of graphics I need an artist to produce.  If I aim for a tile (64 pixels) being equivalent to 20ft, then 1 mile is going to need 264 tiles (16,896 pixels).  Now in reality that’s only going to take 13.2 minutes to traverse (presuming its all level terrain).  Now using a common set of tiles would result in 1 square mile being able to be generated pretty quickly – though splitting them up may be fun…  The problem that I currently run the risk of is the same as Vanguard did a couple of years back, that the world will end up far too large and players could end up not seeing anything for long spaces of time.

Now my intention is to ensure that each race has its own themed area (1 mile across) in a specific theme for their background (plains, woods, swamps & desert).  Around this area would be large land masses with gateways to dungeons and such like (similar to diablo2).  Now my original intention was to have these areas gently blend into each other and for it to all fit within a world map.  However looking at this logically – the UK is 909 miles long, this would equal 239,967 tiles long.  Factor in that the UK is actually small in comparison to most other continents and you suddenly find that doing a ‘true’ map is not just impossible, but actually impractical as well.

Now I’m sure that I’ll think of ways round this, but initially these are some possibilities:

• zones have ‘magical markers’ that prevent characters from going over them
• zones are created with natural edges – mountains, crevices etc – would have to be worked into the background as some type of catrostrophy
• zones are linked via magical circles/transport stones
• everything lives within a small number of zones which are all border connected.  Background would have to justify why all races are so close – some continuity issues regarding variation of racial landscapes (swamp next to a desert)

Some kind of magical transportation would be quite useful regardless of what solution is found – characters ought to have some kind of spell or object that allows them to go home.  (Hearthstone, Gate Spells)