Ok, say you have a basic little engine tiling engine, for simplicity. Your PC is in a nice big country. He ia in a town. How do you go about setting up borders for the PC? What method is best? A You can''t walk anymore system, like in older style stuff Walls that border you in, even though they have no real function like in Diablo 2 Imsurmountable obsticles, like mountains or rivers, even though you are in the middle of the woods A map of the entire country (big and time consuming) Generating tiles based on some fractal algorithm (actually this is more for a 3dengine, but still) so the player can keep walking until he reaches a new map zone Having endzones like in Fallout or Arcanum. IIRC, Arcanum had the endzone system, but also allowed you to keep walking, which I think is ideal. does anyone know how they did that? Was it the random tile thing? I think it seemed like most areas of the game had maps, even the useless inbetween tiles. Also, are any players really going to want to walk all that way and would appreciate the realism of mindless journeys? Is there a good reason to stick that in there?

Fallout and Arcanum each had one or two handmade areas for each terrain type. In Arcanum, this terrain simply tiled. In Fallout, it did not.

I like either unpassable physical barriers (rivers, oceans, mountains, canyons).

Or... border zones that once you pass beyond, you get a little message saying "You have passed into the uncharted wilderness, turn around while you still can!" (or something akin) ... and if you don''t turn around then some pack of rabid wolves appears and tears you apart (or also something akin).

...but always give them a reason why they can''t continue which ties into the world.

I like the idea of randomly generated tiles, but also have a sign post/message that alerts the user to the fact that they are leaving . This way the user doesn''t continue to walk and thinking he is lost only after spending an hour trying to find his way.

The feeling of being trapped in does bother me with alot of games, unpassable forests or rivers makes me wonder why the game character doesn''t just jump over the river/swim past it or slip past the trees. Keeping that feeling of a real (virtual) world without boundaries completes the attachment for me.

What about how alot of the RPG''s do it, traveling far enough takes you to a world screen where the character can traverse great distances with only a few small steps.

Veovis, I like the idea of the random tiles too, but what was cool about Arcanum was at anytime you could jump to the world map and continue in a fallout like manner.

I rather like the you-can''t-walk-any-further method, but the type where walking out that far does something like show a map. It doesn''t neccessarily have to be a rpg like world map, it could be a MarioRPG/MarioMap/FinalFantasyTactics style where its a literal paper map and the player has the option to pick his next location.

I like the idea of being able to wander endlessly in the wilderness, and I think that an automap fractal would be sufficient for that sort of thing. You could construct key areas, like towns, and then have the wilds be a fixed fractal pattern.

For navigation purposes, I''m in favor of an overworld map, unless it''s an MMORPG, in which case you''d probably want to install some kind of teleporting system a la Diablo II so that people can''t just "zip" to an adjacent region when they start losing a fight.

Of course, you''d still need some kind of borders for the overworld, but impassable mountains, rivers, or Veovis'' idea regarding killer wolves. Of course, you could just use a torus-world, and connect all the edges of the fractal. That''s where my money is. Or better still, work out a spherical map (for a 3D game) so you can actually travel on the globe. If you don''t want a whole planet, then use oceans or mountains or wolves/dragons/magical walls.

In Ravenloft2, they did it with a wall of fire. If your party is within this wall, they will suffer, and hp will decrease over time. So, nobody can ever get inside this wall far enough to find the border. And sometimes they put uber items way inside the wall. Damn them.

My way is to tell them that you can''t go beyond the border, but don''t tell them that there is nothing beyond. So anything like, a massive amount of sea, or a very tall mountain, or a vast desert that goes nowhere really doesn''t cut for the job. Just block it with a not-too-wide river, just wide enough to prevent the players from reaching the other bank. Then on the other side, put like a path as if the path will lead you somewhere. That way the player won''t get the idea that "oh, this is it, the end of the world", but they will think "oh, there is something beyond this. I wonder what it is!"

If you ever play Willow in NES, you will understand what I mean. They even put houses! My brother and I spent a lot of time figuring out how to enter those unreachable houses. There must be some secret inside, so we thought. Now I play that game again (with emulator), I just laugh how stupid we were.

You could just make the world flat and if they sail to the horizon then they fall off the world.

The arcanum system worked well, since it linked the world map and game map together so that you could travel from town to town in game map mode... if you really wanted to but that would take a long time.


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Writer, Programer, Cook, I''m a Jack of all Trades
Current Design project
Chaos Factor Design Document

I hate to derail this into another MMORPG discussion but I''ve been wondering...

How could a player travel in a system where a world map is used to connect various zones? I''m imagining something like Baldur''s Gate or Fallout. How does one cross a huge distance that would take "days" of travel while remaining relative to those still playing in the zones? There are only two options I see: Ignore realism in favor of immersion and make it take 30 seconds or so like in Fallout, or rely completely on some kind of magical teleportation (assuming fantasy/medieval setting).