by MedicineStorm » Sun Apr 06, 2014 11:25 am
Argitoth is right: the bigger, the better.
At least initially, the game will likely be a standard-issue Final Fantasy world. By that I do not mean it will have the same style as final fantasy. I mean it will have about 3 continents and a few secret islands. Each continent will have several towns or cities, there will be at least 3 kingdoms initially and several divergent cultures. There will be a diversity of biomes as . The player will not be able to access all land forms immediately, but their progress will continue to open up additional avenues of travel and exploration.
That being said, everything above is subject to change based on gameplay improvements and storyline changes, but it should give you a good general idea.
That is how big the world will probably start out. But how big can the world possibly get? Well, with our current engine designs:
Most of our environments are made up of a mosaic of graphical tiles. One "tile" consists of 32x32 pixels.
A single screen of content is how much of the environment can be displayed to the player at any given time. One "screen" consists of 24x24 tiles.
Our current limitations allow the engine to have 65536x65536 contiguous screens...
...but that's just laterally. A fully packed "planet surface" would be a flat plane of 65536x65536 screens, but what about beneath the surface? We can have a total of 2048 subterranian layers, or 2048 "floors" beneath the surface of the planet, and another 2047 "floors" above the surface of the planet for really tall towers or floating sky cities and stuff. Which is a maximum of (2048x2x65536x65536) 17,592,186,044,416 screens...
Except that is just the main dimension, the "prime material plane", the "midgard realm". There are another 15 possible dimensions that overlay the simulated 3D world: The "shadow realm", or the "plane of the dead", or "the Nether", or "Asgard", or "the Dreamlands", or "The Abyss" which brings the maximum space up to (16x17,592,186,044,416) Two hundred eighty one trillion four hundred seventy four billion nine hundred seventy six million seven hundred ten thousand six hundred fifty six (281,474,976,710,656) screens of content.
... So, yeah; "it can be bigger than we can imagine."