[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 with 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 villages 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, let the player interfere with that and make him wait, etc.

One big problem with this would be that the game map needs to be freaking huge. In the old games you would get that impression since the world map was sort of a zoomed out view of the entire world. But since in this case everything is in the same scale, it would need a nasty amount of tiles.

Second big 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 since 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 or what do you think about this?
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