continuous world article

Howdy all,

I have always been a fan of Dungeon Siege 1 (~2002), but never stood still by the fact that its massive worlds (singleplayer and multiplayer) are completely continuous worlds so without loading times. Here is an interesting article on how they did it and the dozens of lessons they learned it the hard way:
http://scottbilas.com/files/2003/gdc_san_jose/continuous_world_paper.pdf

edit: ofcourse the exact way they did it is to much work for indies/hobbyists (to much asset/mapping work anyway); but its chunks, nodes, doors and pathing systems can be helpfull to give you more ideas for your own obstacles you face or perhaps to gain design ideas.

thanks, seems to be an interesting paper, despite I have not played the game...

your welcone,

Dungeon Siege 1 was fun but I it looks quite outdated now. And singleplayer map is a bit lineair and meh story, but the game shines in its multiplayer map. Its massive, open and diverse. And if you install the right mods you can control a party in multiplayer, add Dungeon Siege 1 expansion content to it and added quests etc. Sadly no graphics mod.

What is quite special about the Dungeon Siege maps however that its huge, allows full backtracking if one wants (not single moment to reset things) and combines that with continuous and lots of different assets which all eat memory. So they needed to implement a system that removes as many stuff from memory when the player is outside a certain area (which as you may quess gives all kinds of problems with e.g. items, enemies, triggered moments and crates/barrels etc). They also had problems with precision etc etc.

I always wondered how they did that. It was really impressive at the time. I will be reading through this! Although I always suspected that they were actually loading stuff when it said "AutoSaving." Sneaky!

Well I personally played alot of multiplayer (with either a friend, or alone with a party mod or with unlimited summonings mod ), but you can play the singeplayer map there to and iirc there weren't any loading times. The only difference between sp and mp was quest progression I think. My quess would be that with autosaving it takes a bit longer to save the whole party with their gear and quest progression.