Maps and submaps
by Demolishun · in Torque Game Engine · 10/01/2004 (11:24 pm) · 2 replies
I am not sure this is the correct place to post this. I have been looking at the terrain discussions about having huge maps for RPGs. One thought I had was using one main map and many sub maps that get loaded when you enter a town or battle. The main map is a much larger scale map that when certain locations are entered another map is loaded for more FPS type play. If anyone remembers Dragon Warrior for the NES that is what they did. The question I have is can you have a map in memory such as the main map and go into a town and come back out without reloading the maps each time? Also, can the maps be set to remember what state you left it is and is this going to be slow? I realize this is not strictly a terrain issue, but it could help people trying to create huge worlds.
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I love programming, I love programming things that go click, whirr, boom. For organized T3D Links visit: http://demolishun.com/?page_id=67
#2
10/02/2004 (5:25 pm)
That was what I was thinking, but I was unsure how to keep objects in the mission you leave to be persistant. Ie when I return, it is as I left it. I guess I could try saving the mission away and then reloading. This would primarily be a single person game. 
Associate James Urquhart
You could try exec()'ing a new mission script when you enter a new area. The script would only include new items for that specific area. You could perhaps also make a SimGroup for those items to temporarily go into (deleting when you go out again).
However, this wouldn't help with your scaling issue, unless you loaded a new terrain in the terrainblock (sending an update to all client's aswell), and removed all unneccesary items from the previous area.
Of course, you could modify torque and hide all the object's (say, outside) instead of deleting them. But the objects would still be taking up valuable memory.
The only other option i can think of is the tried and tested "load a new mission" route.