In many games, even from PlayStation 2 era, the games usually looked like it was a continuous map from start to finish. Take God of War, for example. From start to finish, we are going further on the same path. A lot of modern-day games do that too.
Is it really a continuous map? Do stages change during cutscenes and for us, it looks like it’s just one long map from start to finish?
In: 0
I have no idea how god of war specifically did it but in many games of the time you basically had smartly placed areas where you could just not see outside and it would unload stuff behind you and load stuff ahead of you… goes for games like GTA i think halo did it too.
In GTA vice city for instance you can see other tricks at work.. obviously you cannot hide the whole city when in a helicopter or when looking at a skyline, for instance the map far away is just really low quality and then when you fly or drive close to a building it would load the details in…and cars and such.
Games like metroid prime had doors for that reason because they couldn’t find a seamless way to unload rooms. So in metroid prime you only ever load 2 rooms, the last one and the one you are in. Smart enough devs usually place corridors into major areas so you’d never notice that the whole large area behind u just unloaded behind the door..while the 2nd area loaded is usually a corridor which takes few ressources…open world games do something really similar just they use surroundings to the player to load stuff in
It all depends on the game, but the game will use different techniques to trick you into thinking you are seeing everything all at once. For instance, if you’re playing a game set in a big city, it’s not going to load little details like litter outside of a pre-programmed range – it’s not loading a million pieces of litter across the *whole* map, just where you are looking at. It also often does not load content, at least not to the same level of detail, when you aren’t looking at it, which is why you might see “pop-in” (objects randomly loading out of nowhere) or textures loading when you quickly do a 180 – the game is trying to load everything as quickly as possible that wasn’t there already.
Certain things might be in their own map – for instance, if you’re playing an open world game that has a mission inside a building, you might only be able to go into that building during that one specific mission. That building’s insides might only exist in its own little sandbox-style environment as a separate map file. This helps cut down on how much has to be loaded at once.
If it’s a more linear game then each level tends to be its own map regardless if it is big and open or not, such as in the original Far Cry game.
Open world games typically are one big map (expect for smaller detailed areas, like if you go into a cave or a building). They only process and render what is around you though.
For big open maps, they use tricks like level-of-detail (LOD). The further away something is, the less detail they render. This is why on some games if you approach something like a tree, you’ll see “pop-in” effects where it jumps from a low-resolution blob, to to individual branches, to individual leaves. Only the things closest to you are rendered in high detail.
For smaller areas with lots of details, they do have to switch out areas. To make a smooth experience without load screens, they’ll use some sort of slow action to transition between the areas. A very common one is elevator rides in buildings; you just stand there in the elevator while the game loads in the next floor. More recently, game devs have used stuff like tight passages to make your character slowly move while they load the next area.
its depends on the game and how its engine handles it.
ill go with the example i know off: **Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver**
this game was released on the Playstation one(later on the dreamcast and pc got ports aswell) by Crystal dynamics(CD). The game uses the Gex engine(notably also used in FFVII’s 3d sequences in the battles).
thing worth noting about the playstation 1 were the 2 mb of RAM and the 2x CD Drive(max rate 300kb/s), however outside of the initial loadscreen when starting the game you can go from one side of the world map to the other seamlessly.
CD achieved this by donig a few things:
– clever map design: as in the world map is designed in a manner where it can be split into “chunks” containing modular zones of the map and no line of sight allows you to vie further than 2 zones in into each other. these zones aare also layed out in a manner where outside of a couple of them, you always have to traverse them in order.
– good caching practices: soul reaver ever only loads 3 “chunks” at any given time, the zone the player is currently in and the zones right before and right after in order ot make the most out of the limited memory. As the player transitions zones the further one gets discarded and the next one is loaded in the background.
– Textures are palletized, which severely reduces their memory footprint
– Data on the disc is duplicated: this is done in order to position data that is likely used together to show up in sequence in the disc: this minimizes the motions the drives has ot take to read contiguous data, lowering the time needed to load assets.
thru a combination of these measures CD effectively created a Streaming system in the PS1
Loads of loading and unloading things.
If you’re playing something like a Far Cry game, imagine a ring around the player (you) at roughly 256metres and as you’re moving through the world everything inside that ring is loaded and everything outside of that ring, in terms of gameplay, is unloaded. As you move through the world the engine continually loads and unloads things with relation to that ring. This is why you may see things pop into existence, specifically AI or gameplay objects, at a certain distance from the player. LODs can be used to show things in the distance, sometimes even swapping 3D meshes to 2D images (as it doesn’t matter if they’re so far away), but they won’t have any possible interactions with the player as if they’re outside of that ring they’re just background stuff. If you fire that rocket launcher at that building halfway across the map, when you approach it finally you’ll see no damage as it’s outside of that ring.
Games like The Last Of Us do things slightly differently, as did many games in the past. If you pay attention, you’ll notice that there are many moments where the player moves/drops into a new zone and is unable to return to the previous zone. A door closes, the player jumps down platform or over a wall, the building you were JUST IN EXPLODES, etc. This is the moment where it allows the previous zone to be unloaded and the new zone to be fully loaded. These moments are always chosen and set up in a way that it’s seamless to the player.
All of this is worked out by the team during production to ensure that you don’t run out of memory and crash. And have a great experience, of course.
Latest Answers