Metropolis/Cities in Org. Mode

Okay, I was wondering... when you get really advanced, and you have metropilises all over the globe/galaxy, how will exploring them work in Org. Mode? I mean, I can't imagine the computer having to draw out all of those huge cities in such great deal of detail- I mean, I couldn't imagine it tracking ONE metropolis in such great detail- much less with all the dynamically-moving organisms and vehicles, all performing their own, individual tasks.

Of course, when you zoom out far enough, all the great detail and what-not would just be replaced by special effects, but I can't imagine how the computer would generate the city's detail, or how ot would remember that city in such great detail for the next time you enter it.

Also, what about cities that cannot be explored on the exterior- like ones that can only be survived in by staying in it's interior (*cough*cities that are at the bottom of the ocean*cough*)? We would really need to deck out the interiors system to get this to work.


Discuss this here.

InvaderZim wrote:

Okay, I was wondering... when you get really advanced, and you have metropilises all over the globe/galaxy, how will exploring them work in Org. Mode? I mean, I can't imagine the computer having to draw out all of those huge cities in such great deal of detail- I mean, I couldn't imagine it tracking ONE metropolis in such great detail- much less with all the dynamically-moving organisms and vehicles, all performing their own, individual tasks.

Of course, when you zoom out far enough, all the great detail and what-not would just be replaced by special effects, but I can't imagine how the computer would generate the city's detail, or how ot would remember that city in such great detail for the next time you enter it.

Could be done with sectors. Computer would only load the sector you are in and sectors adjacent to your sector.

Commander Keen wrote:

Could be done with sectors. Computer would only load the sector you are in and sectors adjacent to your sector.

Yes, but storing the layout of every city in one country, let alone a whole array of vastly populated planets, could easily be computer suicide.

US_of_Alaska wrote:

Commander Keen wrote:

Could be done with sectors. Computer would only load the sector you are in and sectors adjacent to your sector.

Yes, but storing the layout of every city in one country, let alone a whole array of vastly populated planets, could easily be computer suicide.

Storing things in memory isn't that tough, and it won't affect performance once it's out of your RAM.

We'll use a lot of Background loading and model simplification, and i know Bashi's got a few tricks up his sleeve.

~sciocont wrote:

US_of_Alaska wrote:

Commander Keen wrote:

Could be done with sectors. Computer would only load the sector you are in and sectors adjacent to your sector.

Yes, but storing the layout of every city in one country, let alone a whole array of vastly populated planets, could easily be computer suicide.

Storing things in memory isn't that tough, and it won't affect performance once it's out of your RAM.

We'll use a lot of Background loading and model simplification, and i know Bashi's got a few tricks up his sleeve.

I'm sure he does- and I expect they're some pretty good ones! However, how would the computer... come up with the street-level details of the cities- and, there are some cities like I mentioned that you can only explore indoors. How would we be able to draw the interior of an entire city without the quality being annoyingly low?


Yes, storing data isn't that hard on your computer, but it's bad for the harddrive. This could easily be a 10 GB game- and then you've got that extra 5 GB you'll need for storing data and creations, ect. ect.


I know there's a way around these things, but I just would like to get things sorted out for the programmers when they get to these parts, and to remind us that we need to think about these little issues before we approach them in devlopment and they could potentially become big issues.

Would we be able to enter buildings or not?

DragonEye4 wrote:

Would we be able to enter buildings or not?

Bashi said something about it not being impossible, but I'm not sure. It was in some other thread. I'll provide a link once I find that thread.



EDIT: I've searched everywhere, but I just couldn't find it.

InvaderZim wrote:

Yes, storing data isn't that hard on your computer, but it's bad for the harddrive. This could easily be a 10 GB game- and then you've got that extra 5 GB you'll need for storing data and creations, ect. ect. .

Minor things can be randomly distributed each time a sector is loaded. Each major thing could have 3 numbers in cache - type, and XY coordinates. That would be about 10 bytes for each building, meaning you can get about 100000 of structures in a 1 megabyte file. So, the biggest planet-wide cities could take about 10 megabytes, and that's quite low.

Commander Keen wrote:

InvaderZim wrote:

Yes, storing data isn't that hard on your computer, but it's bad for the harddrive. This could easily be a 10 GB game- and then you've got that extra 5 GB you'll need for storing data and creations, ect. ect. .

Minor things can be randomly distributed each time a sector is loaded. Each major thing could have 3 numbers in cache - type, and XY coordinates. That would be about 10 bytes for each building, meaning you can get about 100000 of structures in a 1 megabyte file. So, the biggest planet-wide cities could take about 10 megabytes, and that's quite low.

Everything will be in the background if your camera cannot observe it directly. Also, Keen, we need a Z coordinate for when people get creative.