seamless level loads?

[alonzo3]

has anyone heard a whisper about seamless level loads in fps games? im researching co-op mods and this seems like a primary concern. who wants to wait for everyone else to finish one level b4 going on to the next? any knowledgable commentary by coders would be appreciated.

 

[WildfireX]

Well, to be simple, it can be acheived only if you are willing to sacrifice framerates for a continous sense of gameplay. See, you could keep loading the level polygon-by-polygon as they appear, which would be slow.
The coding is pretty simple, it would just require really big world files...

 

[alonzo3]

thanks for the tip. i had talked yesterday with a mapper friend who said it was no problem, and he never mentioned the poly by poly thing. guess ill have to ask him about it .

 

[alonzo3]

can someone tell me what the practical level filesize limit is in UT? is there some reason i cant make a massive map with hundreds of bots in it? assuming that the ai for the bots wasnt a problem (assume they dont exist unless close to the player), cant i make as big a level as i wish? if not, why?

thanks in advance.

 

[Deathwing]

The biggest map size I've seen is about 25mb. When you make a map, you don't put the bots in. If you want to put more than 16 bots into a game, type addbots ## into the console (while you're playing).

 

[alonzo3]

im talking about co-op maps though. sorry, i should have qualified my original question, instead of beating around the bush. my real question is how much processing power do the bots take up if theyre not onscreen, and is there a limit to how big a level can get. did your 25mb map run like **** (not counting polygon overload)?

 

[Tetris L]

From Legends game info it became clear that in U2 you'll return to your mothership after each mission to be briefed for the next mission. The missions don't even take place on the same planets. So it seems U2 will be split into clearly separated sections; not one big seamless episode from start to end.

Which certainly doesn't necessarily mean that the U2 engine / mapping system isn't technically capable to make seamless maps. I'm not sure about this.

 

[alonzo3]

the topic of this post is somewhat misleading, as i reality has scaled back my aspirations quite a bit (as it always does im not really interested in putting an entire game into a single level, but i am interested in making a level large enough to contain, say a small town, or a large village. im working on a design doc for an rpg based on co-op, and i need some hard limits to work with.