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Changing areas (not missions)

by Erik Madison · in Torque Game Engine Advanced · 09/23/2008 (4:15 pm) · 5 replies

Doing some 'research' in a few games out there... how would you handle changing an area, such as entering a building? Think NWN, AnarchyOnline, etc. I don't suppose this is the same as changing missions, as no data is really changing.
I could toss the players off into the abyss (such as pos 10000 10000 10000), but what other methods would work?
Just looking for some ideas to think over...
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Torque Owner Stefan Lundmark
#1
09/23/2008 (4:41 pm)
I can't speak for all games, but in AO, NWN and EQ you really switch between server instances.

Anarchy Online has group selectors, which put you in the same "area" as any other player but on different server instances so you're not visible to those others, and you're offloading the server a bit because you can spread the load since these entities don't have to know about each other.

Torque Owner Erik Madison
#2
09/23/2008 (4:54 pm)
So in TGE terms, you really are switching missions, minus all the data not required?

Torque Owner Stefan Lundmark
#3
09/23/2008 (7:00 pm)
In AO you pretty much do what you would in TGE, yeah. They got static data (like DataBlocks) loaded up and cached, but ghost data has to be transfered from the new zone. The difference there is that they load data for assets when they are needed, not on entering the zone, so load times are smaller than they would in TGE.

I don't know about the other games in this case.

Torque Owner Kiyaku
#4
09/24/2008 (4:09 am)
I'm still making thought about this too. I wonder if i will have an open world in my multiplayer game, or using "zones" as switching the level. Though i don't know yet how players then could communicate between different zones. Is the pre-defined multiplayer part of the tgea example already capable of such functionality?
How would you archive the communications between the players?
Does the server knows about each client when they are in different levels?

Torque Owner Mikael Pettersson
Snowpeak Studios
#5
09/24/2008 (5:08 am)
You normaly seperate the chat server to a seperate server that only handles the chat, and any chat commands that should generate a response in the game is passed on to the specific game server.