How big could a map be? "Meaning the playable area you could walk around in." Im guessing it would only be dependant on loading time, and how long it would take. But the citys and towns in POG were depressingly small. like 10 buildings max, and you couldnt even go into them. Im planning on making an ACTUAL city for my game, with several hundred unique enterable buildings. I was wondering how this would affect my games speed.

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Yes, the limiting factor of maps will be the power of the machine it runs on. AFAIK.

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Quote

Originally posted by theGlueBubble:
Yes, the limiting factor of maps will be the power of the machine it runs on. AFAIK.

Key factors being the amount of memory available to the game and the speed of the hard disk. Back when Fallout first came out, it ran slow as molasses on my 7300. It would take three minutes to load a new map, OFF OF THE HARD DISK. Needless to say, that somewhat discouraged me from playing the game very much.

A year later, after I upgraded to a 7200rpm ATA/66 drive (using an ATA controller), not only did my system boot up in 1/4th the time, but those Fallout maps would load very quickly, too.

Important to keeping your load time down in Coldstone games will be the repetition of graphical elements. I think one of the things that contributes to PoG's "expansive, but not big" map feel is that everything is spaced farther apart. Note that you rarely see two buildings on the same screen together. The graphical elements themselves are composed of rather large individual sprites, as well.

In theory, you could make something that feels larger by having something that has an even more tile-based feel to it, because the graphics would be smaller, there would be fewer of them, and therefore there is less to load off of the disk. It has yet to be seen if this is actually the case, however.

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