Make Sure the Camera Gets Some Love

[Adhin]

Yeah, I think there pre-rendered backgrounds (not tile based) is going to be the biggest factor in that, plus the engine they're using. You kind of have to build an engine from the ground up with that in mind. It involves A LOT of streaming to handle what a load screen technically does. Could they do it? Yes, but im not sure the current engine they're using is capable of it. I also don't think doing one giant overworld map 100% streamed in is nessesary. As long as you can just walk into a house that's on the map, which just requires a disappearing roof... that's a lot easier. And if they had disappearing roof-tech in IE games, could of been done for a good bit of there areas.

 

Why I was saying smaller areas no load, dungoens/mansions, any multi-level thing would benefit, due to the map style, with load screens. You could also say that with the power of the computers now and days a loadscreen can be so fast it practically doesn't matter IF theres a loadscreen. I mean if it takes half a second to load into and out of that little hut... who cares at that point.

[villain of the story]

With the amount of memory and CPU power at our disposal today, there's not much justification for separating indoor/city/wilderness/dungeon areas into separate maps

 

It's and has been about ease of design on most cases for a very very long time, not hardware capabilities. It will always be far easier to design interior and exterior locations completely separately because mixing the two brings a number of design changes that take far more things into consideration and thus longer to design completely independent of hardware limitations. And there are certain advantages and disadvantages to both. In a lot of games with a general strategic/tactical view where the two aren't separated, interiors look poor-ish and it's often hard to make out the details and most of these games had poor ways of resolving the obstructions in line of sight. This is easier to deal with when you have separate inside and outside locations as each can be catered to on an individual basis, free of anything else. The same sadly applies to many of my favourite RPGs. Interiors locations in towns were often plain and dull in Fallout and annoying to look at in Arcanum while they looked very polished and often beautiful in IE games.

 

You could, however, argue that doing it that way is lazy.

 

Personally, the only game where I completely enjoyed that separation was Commandos 2 and Commandos 3. All locations in a map were always active so AI could actually go in an out regardless of where you are and you could even peek inside windows and it would show the interior in a small frame over your main game view outside.