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.