Seamless or Loaded?

[Kran De Loy]

Yeah and an idea just struck me. They also said they want to try to implement weather. So how is naval combat out by oilrig style bases and islands be effected by stormy weather? Higher waves would be pretty necessary for that kind of content to be combined and when I think about stuff like that then in my mind PS2 becomes something entirely different and far too difficult to implement.

So why make the water levels be influenced by foul weather? Because if you didn't it would almost completely break the immersion (excuse the pun) of the game. Being on calm water levels, a boat doesn't move or moves very little but there is a raging thunderstorm going on obscuring the crap out of everyone's vision...

Or not implement weather? That would be waaaaaaaaaay worse then not having naval content to me.

Nah.. doesn't work to me.

Not that I have anything against oilrig style bases or island chains instead of 1 whole solid continent, but the more I think about naval content the worse of a feeling I get the idea is.

[headcrab13]

I already consider Planetside "seamless" just because of how massive the continents are and how infrequently you load. I generally only recall seeing a loading screen once or twice in a 5-6 hour period of gaming, so I sure wouldn't mind if PS2 did the same.

[kaffis]

Originally Posted by Alduron

That's pretty much what I assumed. It would still be nice to squeeze every feature out of Forge Light. :-p

Being seamless when running/driving around is entirely different from being seamless when instantly being transported from one place to another.

Seamless when moving around means that the game is capable of dynamically loading surrounding areas as you move closer to them -- the loading still happens, and still takes time; the point is simply that it happens in the background and finishes before you arrive.

When you bring in teleports, or gates, or recalls, and whatnot, that throws a wrench in the works, because now you're loading something unexpected, and you've arrived before it's had any time to load.

That's not to say this couldn't be worked around in *some* scenarios. The game has an idea of what spawn locations are available to you at any given point, so it can include those as "near" to you, even if it's not physically near. Likewise, I'm sure the warpgates can be treated as "anticipated" movement, and so it wouldn't surprise me if they were able to make warpgate travel seamless.

Even if they cannot, however, that doesn't preclude being able to make "sea travel" between continents seamless at a future date.

[cellinaire]

Everquest next will -highly likely- be seamless (dungeons can be one exception, though).

And PS2 will follow the PS1's way on this topic.


Maybe someday...?

[Alduron]

Originally Posted by kaffis

Being seamless when running/driving around is entirely different from being seamless when instantly being transported from one place to another.

Even if they cannot, however, that doesn't preclude being able to make "sea travel" between continents seamless at a future date.

I get what you're saying. I'm kind of hoping that the maps aren't completely different entities like they were in the first one. Even if we are forced to teleport between them at launch with a load screen to cover pop-in, I'm hoping that later we'll have a more unified Auraxis. Eventually I'd like to to gather troops and fly over the ocean in order to flank the enemy from somewhere they wouldn't expect.

It may never happen, but I'd like to see it.