Possible Map Expansion [Suggestions Category]

Suggestions
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Hey everybody!,

So, I basically just had a quick question for everyone…

I know that there’s a heavy want for ‘infinite worlds’ or map expansion, just general world enlargement, but I really haven’t noticed any agreement or just discussion on the matter. So I rather than just posting a suggestion of what I think Radiant Entertainment should do, I’d much rather have you guys, or that is, all of us discuss what would be the best course of action for this, if even possible, feature.

To get the ball rolling a little, there’s already a few noted ideas on how to proceed with said feature, and I’ve added them below:

  1. Infinite Worlds: As far as I have seen and heard, infinite worlds in Stonehearth leans over to the rather difficult side as opposed to simple and easy, when it comes to actually implementing it into the game. But hey, who knows, there could be a way, so we could always leave it in for discussion.

  2. Map Segments: Basically what this means is, you load up your square portion of the map. Once you leave the area, for example, with soldiers, either North, East, South, or West, you’ll load up the square block that’s adjacent to your previous location. For me, if you’ve ever heard of it, I think the idea is identical to Sim City 4’s map/region system.

Just to throw it out there, I personally love this idea. It allows for much faster load times, while still having a massive world. I could go on about this, but this post is long enough, so I’ll skip that for now…

  1. Larger Worlds: Just as it sounds; the maps would be bigger. I really can’t explain that any further… They’d be bigger (period) (.)

But what do you guys think!?

 Let me know and let's talk about it!
      -Surly
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This is by far the best idea I ever heard!
I don’t think infinite worlds are needed currently because there are too many show-stopper in this game
The devs should expand it 200 blocks more because that is a reasonable expansion, isn’t it?

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I think that for now the worlds just need to be slightly bigger.
We got no reasons to explore the world now, so infinite or huge worlds don’t need to be implemented yet.
I would like the world to be maybe 50% bigger to each side, so you don’t see the side of the map when building huge cities.

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Hey guys!,

Thanks for commenting!

There’s something I forgot to mention in the original post… As far as the ideas expand, I mainly refer to the actual full release of the game. I want to talk about the feature now though, so when the time does come for such a feature being built in, there’s some foundation on what the community would like to see. There’s no way I’d consider even asking the developers to implement such a feature at such a very, very early stage of development as we are in now.

So with that, let me re-phrase my main question slightly:

Once the game is fully completed, what idea would you like to see in the final product towards map expansion?

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I would like to see the world expand with the net worth values, So if its extremely low you can only travel so far. I would love infinite worlds but sadly I don’t think we’ll get that. As long as I can build loads and have a hugeish world I’d be happy.

The only thing is, If the world remains some what small how would different biome’s work? Of course I’d doubt it would have a answer this early, I see it working either by Portals or Each side of the world would have a option to explore and you could go through different area’s.

It is said that we shouldn’t hit boarders so I’m interested in how it will work, Maybe each world will feature a different biome,

But yeah, I’m excited to see how world generation will play out :wink:

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Well Surly you are talking about way into the future
Once this game has been released I’ll …
Actually, I’ll still be young and dumb T_T

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TO Stoneheartfan,

Wow! Great ideas! I really like the idea on expanding the world based off of Net Worth Value. That sort of adds the feeling of “leveling up” in a way.

But to skip ahead, I’m right there with ya’, I’m also excited to see world generation unfold. Although, speaking about World Generation, for some reason, my biggest concern isn’t about the size of the map oddly enough (says the guy who made this post), but rather the small details that make it up. For instance, having pre-built waterfalls, more realistic mountains, and just plain ol’ flowers, grass, and rocks is something I look forward to the most… if that’s even planned of course, I was just speculating.

But cool! Sweet comment.

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TO xXSlimeyXx,

I am talking about way into the future, but, hey, it never hurts to start early.

And I have good news for you, have no fear, I’m 22, in college with three majors, and I’m still very, VERY, dumb. But you get used to it.

Anyway, thanks for commenting buddy!

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I like the idea to have a huge (5 times bigger world selection) and in that same map we could have multiple villages that interact with military power or trading goods, that would be really good.

the game could work on a chunk load, you select in what direction you wold like to see and the engine would load that chunk while unloading the ones at the opposite side.

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TO flpsantoss,

Cool idea my friend! That’s near exactly how Sim City 4’s region system worked. To explain for those who may not know, Sim City 4 had it to where you’d have a massive map; and within that same map, you would have a number of smaller sections of the map with which to build in. And if you built a town/city adjacent to another town/city, you would be able to trade, interconnect railways, roads, and highways, and possibly share water and waste supplies.

So with that, I think something along that line would not only be the best course of action, allowing for faster load times and possibly more small details to crammed into each and every map, rather than having to be spread out across a huge, open world, but would also bring back, from what I’ve seen from that sort of “era of gaming”, an old fan favorite.

But I digress, thanks for the comment!

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Sim City (2013) not 4

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TO flpsantoss,

Ah, yes, that Sim City… I have a rule to never speak of that game. No, but that game did have that feature, and is, again, very similar to your idea. But Sim City 4 did also have that same sort of system. Heck, even the 1999 Sim City 3000 had something similar.

Ah, glorious memories…

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well to my knowledge all this is planned,

the flowers and rocks are already kind implemented, and im hoping we will eventually get grass.

the waterfalls will definitely make it into water stage 2, unless i was lied to…

on the topic of features/things in and around the world, i really cant wait to see ancient ruins and artifacts and hidden treasure and, the list just keeps going!

on the topic of world size, i think that once we get ruins/artifacts the world would in some ways need to be infinite, depending on the variety of ruins/artifacts they made.

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TO 8BitCrab,

First of all, if all of that is planned, and that screenshot that I love dearly is true (This screenshot: http://stonehearth.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/farm.jpg), plus the addition of full-fledged grass, this game is going to break my ‘cuteness’ meter. I don’t know what that means… I tried making a joke there, but it didn’t work…

Anyway! On the topic of Infinite Worlds… Thinking about it now, it could very well be possible to have such a feature alongside the “Map Segments” idea. That is, you could say ‘in theory’ that since every map is randomly generated, and you’d have to load each map segment… you could in turn keep loading newly, randomly generated maps over and over again the more you traveled.

And again, it may be obvious, but as you mentioned about the ruins/artifacts, having that sort of system would then allow for faster load times, as well as an infinite amount of space to build, resources to gather, enemies to encounter, and ruins to scavenge.

Hmm… Whelp, sorry for my long dribbling there. Thanks for the comment!

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your not alone on that…

hopefully im not getting people mixed up, @RepeatPan ,has said that infinite worlds would actually be possible even at this stage of the game, if it werent for stability issues…

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As far as the original ideas go, I think simply making larger worlds would be the easiest thing for Radiant to do, especially as I’m sure there’s plenty more optimising that can be done to the game.

Map segments wouldn’t work nearly as well however, for several reasons:

  1. Loading time between segments.
  2. Does time freeze on unloaded segments? If not, how do you monitor both segments, especially when taking into account point 1?
  3. I think it would feel rather clunky even if points 1 & 2 were satisfactorily addressed. SimCity 4 maps are, from what I can tell, glorified save game files - when you enter one you load it and the city on it, but you don’t have all the other regions clogging up your memory in the background. More, in SimCity games you typically only work on 1 city at a time, so there’s only a need to have 1 loaded at any one time, whereas in Stonehearth you’d want any segment loaded if it has your hearthlings (or their property, mining zones, etc) on it.

Personally, I’d like to see the infinite worlds variety - I know it would be a resource hog if you explored too much, but that would only be a problem much later in the game.

By the way @DontCallMeSurly, you can use the

tags to more easily respond to people here, and putting the “@” symbol before their name (like I did with yours) will flag the post for them :slight_smile: . It also means you can highlight text more easily in replies etc, as putting everything in code tags removes all the formatting :slight_smile: .

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TO @Teleros,

Thanks for the tip about using the “@” symbol!

And… wow, thanks for the comment. I’ll be honest, I’ve been amazed at this forum and the people who inhabit it; to actually have an actual conversation with someone is quite magical. I say that coming from the GTA Forums… and, well… I don’t want to talk about it.

But yeah, you have some great points that I didn’t even think about. For instance, would players even want more loading screens? I’m kinda’ shocked that didn’t even come to mind.

Another question though; would players want that, having one map segment paused while they’re working on the other? Or would a single, constantly working map be better?

Hmm… Interesting.

Well in my opinion, there’s a game I just played for the first time… Kingdom Wars… No one’s heard of it, but it’s a really good medieval RTS building game, and honestly, of very high quality. Which by the way, I’d highly recommend to anyone reading this. There’s the first one, which is one of those silly Free to Play type games where you have the option to pay for advancement… but still provides a great demo of the game… and for Free. Then there’s the second one which just came out, Kingdom Wars 2: Battles, which costs money to purchase.

ANYWAY! Sorry for that… That had an element to where, if you weren’t playing the game (offline), the game would still run in a way. And once you came back, you obtained all the resources your peasants gathered even while you were away. Same goes for being attacked.

So with that same concept, what would you say to this idea?:

We could still have the “Map Segments” idea… I prefer that idea over anything else because it allows for, as you said about Sim City 4, other regions/maps not clogging up memory in the background. But, well, let me give you an example.

You have two cities. One in each of their own “map segment.” You work on the first city, telling workers to go mine, farm, build multiple structures, and harvest lumber. You then go the your second city, and do the same thing. While you’re in your second city, the first could still be running, in a way, but without your control. And once you re-entered that city, assuming you waited an appropriate amount time for everything to be completed, your workers will have already completed their tasks.

As for being attacked, I don’t think that having the A.I. just battle it out without your control is a very good idea… especially considering Building Destruction is planned for the game. Instead I think, if you’re away from a city that’s about to be attacked, it would just inform you about the incoming attack and you’d have to go load that map.

Although, that brings up a whole host of other questions… Whelp, I’ll stop there. I’ve written far too much. And just to point out, I’m not taking this game or conversation SUPER SERIOUSLY… It’s just fun to debate and ‘conversate.’

Thanks for the comment!
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TO @8BitCrab,

Before anything else, may I ask you who “RepeatPan” is? I haven’t checked yet, but is he/she a developer or just a seriously good “coder?” “Coder?” Is that a word?

Huh, no matter…

Anyway, that’s really cool!; that Infinite Worlds is even possible at this stage of development, if not for the, as you said as well, the stability issues.

Cool! Thanks for the comment friend!

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hes a coder, he knows a lot about the stonehearth code.

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TO @8BitCrab,

Ah, well you there you go.

 Again, cool that Infinite Worlds may be a possibility even now!