The Mana World Forums

I want to know when the new server comes, if will exist the map change as in Ragnarok online or the world will be plain as UO.

I really like UO way to do the things, as shops, houses, cities and dungeons. No map loading between places.

Even if I like better the UO way I think we will go with RO map changing for 2 main reasons: it's easier to implement in the server, it's easier to build, manage and expand the world.
Don't take my word as law, we're still planning the server so everything can change. Thx for helping us in pointing out things.

i think the map shouldnt change that much

but of course changes should be possible.
at least in that way that players can build new villages

Why is there no "no opinion, I really don't know" type option in the poll..?

I'm with Rotonen because I can't decide at this point either. Of course there will be map switching because you can't just put caves on the main map or build the whole world as one single map, but wether houses should be separate maps will need some thought. It depends wether we want to make them bigger on the inside then on the outside. If not, we could think about a way to take off the roof when you walk inside.

hmm i dunno what i should think about these "invisible roof"
well i guess this would become to complex if there is a really huge house

Area doesn't really matter, but it gets complex when the house has multiple floors.

yeah meant that ... lol but couldnt find the right word

Bjørn wrote:I'm with Rotonen because I can't decide at this point either. Of course there will be map switching because you can't just put caves on the main map or build the whole world as one single map, but wether houses should be separate maps will need some thought. It depends wether we want to make them bigger on the inside then on the outside. If not, we could think about a way to take off the roof when you walk inside.

In UO everything is in one big map (5000x6000 tiles), dungeons and everything...

When you walk inside a roof the roof disapear (we can user 33% tranparency) to do a good looking view

A bit offtopic, but why are we constantly compared to RO these days..?

Well what a surprise, we use an RO server and as such our game uses like the complete RO ruleset. Maybe we have to send out a clearer message that cloning RO or staying with that server is not what we're after though, but I think most people know this.

About the UO way of mapping, that just sounds like madness to me. We're at least going for a multi-map scheme, actually some of which (like caves) could be randomly generated.

I was thinking about this before, and I don't know quite how it would be implemented but:

suppose when a player and his party enter a dungeon, a random dungeon is generated on the leader's PC and that PC becomes the dungeon server for all the party. That way, each party has an exclusive dungeon to themselves, rather than having to share with the rest of the world. Also, it allows dungeons to be tailored to the capabilities of the party (larger party = harder dungeon) When they re-emerge into the shared world, they are reconnected to the offical TMW server. This saves server bandwidth also, though it would involve alot more work.

By the way: Map switching saves you alot of information processing, because you don't have to load all the tilesets at once, you don't have to keep track of who is in what area of the huge map (and therefore if their info gets sent to the clients or not), you only have to load the monsters and NPCs for a specific map, you can add new maps at will, without having to stretch a massive rectangular board. The reason RO can add new worlds easily is that they just tack on another warp portal and there it is. UO's system is way too inflexible for a growing game.

Please keep in mind the client cannot be trusted and we cannot start performing tricks like you described above. The server has to generate the random map and will have to cope with the players exploring it. If someone else enters, he'll simply enter the same map.

Another practical problem with making a client a server is that this will simply give rather weird problems when this client is behind a router, which is likely. But anyway, the real problem simply remains the player isn't trusted.

Remember though, that we don't necessarily need to send over the generated map. The map will be generated using a certain random seed, and only this seed (just a number) will have to be sent to the clients when the clients incorporate the same random map generation routine. The map actually won't be that big though, like it isn't really expected to ever grow above 10 K.

I see. I understand the problems that could arise from a system like that. We need to think of a way to avoid dungeon clogging though (hundreds of people clumped together in the same dungeon.) Maybe just having a high number of dungeons would solve that, but I don't know. You really lose that forbidding dungeon feel when there are 30 other people around. I think that's something we all want to avoid.

That's why the world should be big, and caves often randomly generated (because there will be MANY and we can't map them all by hand). A crowded cave will always be a cave people will leave from I think, so that should keep any crowd to moderate levels. And to find some deserted cave, all you have to do is start exploring. Caves can also have multiple levels and go very deep.

Note also that while I call them caves, we'll have similar things like cellars, catacombs, dungeons, lairs. And we could also have similar maps for "deep forest" areas that are build in the same way and are just inside thick forest areas where you'd have some small entrance to it from outside.