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?
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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
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