Brainstorming: Curtailing Infinite World Folder Size Growth

[DerfK]

Here's another idea I just thought of. What do those jumbled up tiles from different time zones suggest to you? A variation on Tetris or Bejeweled, anyone? It sounds a little crazy, but what if you had a mission in one of several tiles. Solving the mission would return the tile to its proper timeline or something like that -- it would disappear. The remaining tiles would then move in to occupy the missing space -- space and time are collapsing in on themselves. If you manage to line up and clear several tiles in a row, you get special bonuses. One of your subgoals (which you don't have to care about too much) is to return every tile to its proper time. A macro puzzle game mechanic also ties in well with the concept of infinite worlds -- Bejeweled can go on forever.

I kind of like this idea, and it could even tie in with the "rare stable continent" idea.  I'm not sure how well it would tie in to the current backstory, but returning tiles to their proper timeline would be an interesting side job, even if it only increments a score counter or something like that (regions saved vs regions lost).  Rather than letting the unstable continents be destroyed, you could work to "return" as much of it as possible before that happens.  It would return whole region groups as you completed missions (ie. a 3x3 ice age group rather than each individual ice age region).  I suppose  this might get tedious after a while though.

Thinking about the shards being unstable, I wanted to throw a different idea into the ring even though it's been months... what about the shards continuing to shift in time?  The settlement itself would stay but any shard not "nailed down" by a settlement, windmill, lieutenant or overlord could slip off and be replaced, essentially re-rolling that section of the continent (possibly even with a new lieutenant if the overlord hasn't been beaten yet) and letting it ditch all the cave data.  If someone is so pleased with how their caves turned out, they can drop a windmill (or perhaps a Guardian Power specific to this purpose) on that shard.

It could even be a Guardian Power to force the system to replace one square (minor) or an entire shard (major) with a randomly selected land type. 

Maybe I'm just bitter my starting continent had no swamp, lava flats, etc ;-)

[omegajasam]

I actually was thinking the same thing. If the data is only generated on entry, then having the tiles (rarely/slowly) get shiffted to new ones would work fine. It would also mean if someone did go back, they just end up making new areas to explore.

[Kentarou]

I love the idea mentioned above about finding the Valley Without Wind. It could be a mobless, beautiful, lush sort of "trophy" type of area where, after you beat say 3-5 Overlords you unlock and all your settlements are moved to chosen tiles on that map. It could give the feeling of creating a larger population and city, (colonies placed beside each other giving the feel of a city building up) it would be finite lowering resource usage, and the rest of the continent could sink into the sea purging the data. It would give the feeling of saving the survivors and their settlements you've built so much upon all while still letting you feel that the cataclysm is still going on.

I really like this idea. But what do I know, this is my first post and I'm still on my first continent. xD Either way I'm addicted to this game and I can't wait to see the direction it will take in the future.

[TKilburn]

One of the things that Keith and I had been thinking about with the Continents idea is that it's a way for us to split up the world into yet more component files (continent files) so that not all of it has to be in RAM at once.  And not all of it has to be synced across the network to new players, and all of that sort of thing.  Of course there are solid gameplay reasons for doing continents as well, and that's what we focused on in the other thread that was specifically about continents.

Constantly splitting files will not help. Cataclysm did this and bad things happened (6GB saves are not fun).

Could there be any way to create a diff system like in version control systems that could track incremental changes (to save time on backups)?

This was something Cataclysm HAD to do due to the above 6GB saves.

An alternate twist might be that overlords were maintaining the continent, in their oppressive way, and in killing them the continent now decays.  Kind of blur the line between what is good or evil.

Oh a Load Bearing Boss, that is a good idea.

[Snave]

With the art revamp, it could be possible to actually show the "cracks between time shards" on the map. In this case, you could have them fluctuate a bit in regular gameplay, and then, later on, slowly widen, until everything is eveloped. What I'm saying is that the possibility could exist to show players what is happening, rather than tell them, and still wipe out huge chunks of data at the same time.

[Stinger]

If anyone would listen to me, I would like to offer to expand your audience by porting this game to ubuntu.  you'd be amazed how many people out there use *nux or *nix or *BSD.  If you would allow, I could compile the game to run on as many flavors of linux as you like and i could also make an installer for linux.

[Aklyon]

Stinger, if you'd seen any thread besides this one, you'd know that they're slowly working on getting Unity 4 working. Though it might not be for AVWW1, yet.