Large maps

Is having a large game map (say 5x5 screens worth) loaded possibly going to be a problem? Or will this be okay for modern hardware?

Or would I need some sort of streaming solution that loaded resources near the player and unloaded things further away?

I know this question is awfully open-ended, but I don't have a frame of reference on this one.

Comments

  • edited May 2013
    Well, a large map by itself shouldn't really matter.
    However it really depends what you mean by it.

    Do you mean a single very large texture? If so, hardware usually limits the size of texture to either 2048 or 4096 texels per side.

    The only real limitation you would get is linked to the number of orxOBJECTs that are alive.
    It's mostly due to the renderer that has to parse that list everytime as orx doesn't have a partitioner yet.

    That being said, on my machine I can easily handle a few thousands of objects, but it's still a good practice to keep that number under control, usually by loading objects by zones.

    I'd like to add async resource loading in the coming weeks, that could really help in that case, however I don't have any ETA.
  • edited May 2013
    Okay, good to know. I haven't reached any limit or had any problems, I just wanted to know before I went whole-hog and started adding things.

    I'm going to modify my mapgen to break up larger images into (say) 1024x1024 tiles.
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