[Flawe]

So I'm thinking of trying something out. I'm thinking of making a test project inspired by old SquareSoft RPGs, early FF games, Chrono Trigger, etc. Combat style should be like Secret of Mana, no random encounters that teleports you to another screen.

However, instead of following the same pattern and having the topdown view for villages and dungeons and the pseudo 3D mode-7 for the "world map", I want to make the entire game in a topdown view.

I'm sure you all know what I mean but in case you don't, imagine playing FF3 and leaving the bounds of a village. You would get teleported to the world map where you can walk around, get random monster encounters and find another village/dungeon to enter. Now in my project there would be no village bounds. If you leave the village you would just continue in the same kind of environment, fighting like Secret of Mana by swinging your sword at stuff.

The reason why I want to do this is because I think the old way breaks the game flow. You're in the world map, looking for dungeons and fighting enemies and then suddenly you're in a village where nothing bad can happen and everything else is different. Doing it the other way you could have new gameplay elements likes monsters entering villages and scripted events inside dungeons like larger battles and so on. Another pretty cool thing you could easily implement is scripted travel. Say you'd want an NPC to walk from one village to the other. Instead of teleporting him or faking it some other way, you could actually let him walk the road and let player wait for the NPC's arrival or something in that direction.

Oh..oh! The number one reason for trying to implement this is because of the streaming. We stream in parts of the map all the time so you never have to switch screens. This will also enable huge, theoretically infinite, maps. You could even use predictable random numbers to create really large worlds.

In older games you would get the impression that the map was huge since the world map was sort of a zoomed out view of the entire world. But in this case everything is the same scale, it would need a nasty amount of tiles to not make the game world feel tiny.

Second problem is that the old way lets you load stuff on demand. You exit a village, you load the world map. You enter a dungeon, you load the dungeon map. My way, you can't do that, it's all seamless. However, I have a pretty good streaming system which I played around with a while ago that can handle this.

Third big problem I can see is how you could handle things like NPC A in village 1 delivers something to NPC B in village 2. If you are in village 1 and fire off the sequence of these events, village 2 might not be loaded in memory because of the streaming system. How would you set the correct flag on NPC B that he got the delivery if the object is not loaded in memory? I guess you could have a pool with global data to handle things like these but I haven't thought much about a solution.

Do you guys have any ideas? What do you think about this?
_________________
www.flaviusalecu.com
www.moddb.com/mods/airborn
www.splashdamage.com
www.brinkthegame.com

[DeveloperX]

This sounds really cool.
Good luck with the implementation.

I don't have time to detail any other thoughts about it right now, sorry.

*returns to job searching*
_________________
Principal Software Architect
Rambling Indie Games, LLC

See my professional portfolio

[tcaudilllg]

I like your ideas. So what you're proposing is to remove the "barrier" around towns, and let monsters in? You could actually do that nowadays: the barrier is a relic from the days when memory was scarce.

[Rainer Deyke]

It's a nice idea, but hardly novel. The Ultima series has done this since Ultima 6, and a couple of my unfinished unreleased projects used the same technique.

From a technical perspective, the thing to watch out for is the boundary to of the active zone. Consider this scenario:

• The player moves near a village, so part of the village is activated.
  
• This triggers a spawn point, causing an npc to spawn in the village.
  
• The npc's script tells it to move to some other part of the village, outside the active zone.
  
• The npc leaves the active zone and is removed from the game.
  
• When the player reaches the village, the npc is missing.

There are a couple ways of dealing with this issue, all with their own drawbacks.

[Flawe]

Yeah, Ultima didn't have the boundaries, but if I remember correctly they didn't utilize it very much did they? I mean, you can have scripted village raids or large battles or even wars between different villages, etc. It's not really anything new, I know that, but I don't think it's been used to the full extent.

Also, what I'd like to experiment with more is the predictable random numbers concept. Streaming in the world will create the opportunity to have huge maps. Together with predictable random numbers, you can create infinite maps. I like the idea but RPGs are story based so I'm not sure how well it will work.
_________________
www.flaviusalecu.com
www.moddb.com/mods/airborn
www.splashdamage.com
www.brinkthegame.com

[tcaudilllg]

Why not have random stories? It's been done in The Sims. Give "people" motivation and watch them go. :)

[Jon Alma]