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Practical map size limit?

Started by EoceneMiacid, April 21, 2019, 03:08:39 PM

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EoceneMiacid

Instead of linear progression through a series of maps, I'm interested in having the player explore a single, large map, with some required backtracking, akin to a Metroidvania game.

Doom 3 maps can be absolutely humongous, large enough to contain a whole game in, so why even bother splitting the campaign up into separate maps? Considering generous use of visportals and keeping active monster count under control, are there any hard limits I'm eventually going to run into, or is this a bad idea for other reasons altogether?


The Happy Friar

loading time & entity count are the biggest threats to large maps.  Every new projectile = new entity.  I'm not sure how well D3 recycles them, I'd figure it does though.
Big advantage is no more loading.  Icarus Starship Command Simulator takes forever to load but never loads again, a big plus. 

My theory is if map changes are at points that make sense, it's all good.  If you can load maps fast then you can do them at other points (like around corners, etc).

LDAsh

Doesn't the original engine have a limit of 4096 entities per map?  That would be the huge deal-breaker.  It sounds like a lot, but when you consider that it basically includes EVERYTHING that isn't worldspawn, it will quickly dwindle.  I believe BFG is different in this regard.

EoceneMiacid

The entity limit is good to know, thanks.

Problem is I don't mind using multiple maps per se, and while one can have multiple exits in a map, one can't have more than a single starting point, and the state of maps isn't preserved when exiting to another one.

aphexjh

I may be wrong, but I believe maps can have multiple start points, I just dont know how you would access them. iirc this cutscene was accessed via a secondary start location

The Happy Friar

Not only can you have multiple starting points in a single map, but you can setup entities/maps to have certain things preserved between maps.

LDAsh

Which would bring back again to the 4096 entity limit.  The Dark Mod forums would be a good place to look around for tricks to minimise that.  I think they have beefed up that limit in their version of the engine now, but I remember a lot of discussion about different methods to get around it before that happened.

EoceneMiacid

If freely travelling back and forth maps is possible, then the entity limit isn't a problem.

The Happy Friar

in the D3 cvar/command help file, do a search for "persistent".  Will give relevant script commands.
I played with storing extra strings/#'s in the player's entity & that seemed to work.  Game doesn't seem to purge non-useless key/values upon map load (IE I can add key/value "door123open/0" to the player & it can be accessed next level).