With the procedurally generated world, how are you thinking of handling the processing load? Is the random generation going to be like minecraft, only with higher graphics, and I guess only loading in the map tile(s) that you're currently on?
(I know that may not have been fully worked out, just wondering what your initial ideas are)
Actually, this is one aspect that we've completely worked out. Minecraft has it's challenges because of being a seamless world. However, that mostly makes sense in a 3d context, anyway. We're having a sytrm of "chunks" that are like the areas you can walk around in in any classic snes game: Zelda 3, chrono trigger, final fantasy iv or vi, secret of mana... I actually can't think of an rpg or adventure game from that time that doesn't use the mechanic.
Anyway, so in single player only on chunk is ever active at a time. The rest is all just sitting idle on disk. For "persistent" stuff that happens when you are not looking, that generally will happening via a "rapid aging" mechanism when you next enter a chunk. In multiplayer, assuming we manage that, then one chunk per player could be active at once, presuming no two players are in the same chunk (which of course they could be, so it could be as few as one chunk that is in memory because all the players are in it together). The chunk-processing load benefits from our experience doing extreme amounts of processing for ai war, so even doing 16+ chunks at once if we had to should be a trivial load. The actual network traffic is a much larger concern with that (if there's a problem, that's where it would be, anyway, and what would set the bounds on how many players could be in-game at once).
The game won't had savegames, but rather will have "world files" that get persisted to disk as you move around and play, and when you exit, etc. So in that respect very similar to minecraft. But the overall design of our game is much more hierarchal rather than freeform: the world map contains tiles that each link to a region, and that region is made up of chunks. When you first enter a new region, the game will pause for a brief second (depending on your CPU it might not even be noticeable), as it does a very rough first pass of generating the chunks, deciding on a few macro-level attributes, etc. Then as you enter each chunk for the first time, it goes through the more detailed chunk-building process that populated that one specific area.each subsequent time you go into the region there is nothing more to do, but each time you go into a chunk, it goes through that rapid aging process.
A chunk can be as small as a single floor of a little house, or it could be much larger. We're still experimenting with chunk sizes, but Zelda 3 is a good gauge forthe rough sort of minimum size we're shooting for.
A region is pretty sizeable, actually: one region is probably larger than the entire overworld of Zelda 3. There would be dozens or even hundreds of chunks per region. The reason for hundreds of chunks is if you see, for instance, 15 office buildings in a single region, and they all have 20 floors... And you can go anywhere you see... And each floor of each building is a chunk... That's 300 chunks right there for the office buildings alone. And that's before you even get into caves or the region underworld, etc.
In terms of the world map, as you move around your view causes new regions to populate and get saved. Just the very barest of info is calculated at that stage: broad type of region, general difficulty, if it connects to any other regions via tunnels, that sort of thing. That gets saved to disk, and first time you enter any given region it uses that info to do the generation.
There are various other considerations with all of that, too, but that's the broad outline. It keeps CPU requirements to a minimum, and should keepworld building lag" constrained to just transitions into new regions and/or chunks that you've never been to before. And even that should be pretty slight in most cases. So far with our test chunk, it's less than half a second, but it's not fully populated yet. Anyway, thats how the world will be literally infinite. The only hardware limitation is the size of your hard disk, not the amount of CPU or ram you have. I don't know how big te largest worlds might get in terms of hard disk space, but I'd be surprised if it was more than a couple of dozen megabytes in most cases, and a couple of hundred in the really extreme cases. If you figure that, compressed, an ai war galaxy fits into 1-8 megs in most cases, that's a pretty good gauge. Of course, having a split-by-chunk file structure will mean that the opportunities for compression will be more limited.
Apologies for any typos, wrote this on my phone.
