Hello Forum!
Today I’m here trying to find some size suggestions for my map, which I will introduce briefly.
What is the map for?
It is for an action story game, where players collect, run, do tasks and fight in order to complete the requirements of the story.
What are the cities and railways?
The cities are either civilian cities with some resources to collect, with little or no hostile activities from the Alaskan army, or government forts are cities with armed NPCs and certain special tasks to be done inside them. There is only one slightly larger civilian city, which is the starting base, Anadyr, and two government forts, Anchorage and Fairbanks. There is three intractable village/towns, two in Siberia, one in Alaska.
Railways are the tracks for trains, the most used transport in the game. There are no other land vehicles.
Here is a rough sketch of the map
As we are trying to build it, we come into the question for the map size, we do not really know how long the railway should be, how wide should the map around the railway be, and big should the map be around the cities/villages.
Note: Players cannot leave too far away from the cities or get off the train while it’s running, or else the players die in a blizzard. Therefore we do not need to build the map that is not around the city or the railways.
I would really appreciate some tips for the size of the map!
The train will run at least 15 studs/s minimum, and the players walk at 16 speed, sprint at 22 speed.
Thank you!
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Going from your description, here’s how I would implement this:
Have every city be a unique place (with multiple servers), when travelling to another city you will simply get teleported to a server of that other city’s place.
This way you can keep relatively small servers for performance reasons.
The questions now are: how large does every city need to be and how to lay out all the connections between the cities.
For the first question, my advice is to make them small. You want as much social interaction as possible to keep your players entertained. Making the maps to large will prevent players from meeting each other.
The second question is a part of planning (draw it out), and I’ll leave that up to you.
This seems like a very ambitious project, so good luck to you.
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Thank you for your reply!
Other than the Fairbanks fortress, which is a relatively modern facility with an outskirt, the rest of the black points are either outpost bases, village towns, or a slightly bit bigger village town.
Each the smaller villages and outpost bases are approximately the size of a jailbreak prison, with a few dozens of buildings and some decors, the starting town is twice as big, so is the Fairbanks fortress with a bit more complexity, but not any bigger in size. Therefore, the full map, if well optimized, will not be that laggy, as it is not real world scaled. 
Do you possibly have a suggestion for the railway length? (400km on the map = 3000 studs in Studio?)
If the players never step outside of the train (except for stations), then the length doesn’t matter.
You can just fake movement while they’re in the train.
Most players will probably be bored by a long train ride, so I recommend keeping the time spent travelling low.
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Thanks again!
Good idea, I’ll see whether if we should use false movement. There will be a lot of scenes where NPCs (zombies) chases the train to attack it, and plus, there are actual biomes, and fake movements will be complicated.
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