One giant, seamless 'level'?

[Pixelthief]

Fairly screwed, yes. There would be ways to create minor effects like this through the level editor, but I don't think you'd find anything efficient or seamless without either losing crux functionality or doing it from the ground up.

For example, you could do a minor 'fake' effect by having your game load the 'next' level inside of a subapplication without the player visible, and putting that subapp at an X/Y offset from the screen, leaving large empty borders on each level for it to overlap, so that you can appear to 'peek' into the next level, but in reality that level doesn't really exist in your memory until you reach it. Not to mention it would be horribly inefficient

[Televangelist]

Gotcha. So it wouldn't be able to have an event when you reach a certain point that says "When you pass through tunnel XYZ heading east, un-load the western half of the word, and when you pass through this same tunnel heading west, un-load the eastern half of the world", that sort of thing?

What if I were to start world-building now, and then import that into a custom level-editor later to add in dynamic loading features?


(Also, I assume building a custom level editor for an MMF2 project is a difficult task that would probably require the hiring of a talented coder?)

[00J]

I believe Sonic the Headghog is updated on the fly, the level is generated, it's not already a big map filled in.

[mobichan]

Televangelist: I'm not entirely sure you understand how a custom level editor would work. Essentially, you use a custom editor so you can export the position of your level data (and their properties) to a file that stores all that data. Then your game would load in that data when it needs it. It is a simple enough concept, but not very simple to implement if you are new to MMF or coding in general. There are lots of level editor examples floating around if you want to research how to approach making one. Just do a search in the forums. But also keep in mind that the "seamless" levels you see in other games are just tricks. No game really loads in everything at one time. It is up to you as a game maker to figure out the clever tricks that make people think your game is seamless.

[Pixelthief]

Even a simple trick like I was talking about can give a good impression. Imagine a setup that looks like this. Say you have a 480x480 game window, with large levels. Then on each level, you'd put a big empty 240 pixel margin on the edge of it. So if you had a 10000x10000 size level, you'd make it 10480x10480, with 240 pixels of say black quick backdrop on the top, bottom, left & right borders.

Then on each border, put a subapplication that opens the level to that side as a 480x480 window. Make sure its only active when you are within range of it (load on call might suffice), and have it open the level and flag the player to be invisible somehow (might take some trick), and pause that subapp. Then when the player moves to each left/right/top/bottom side, he'll see the next level.

Of course, to make this efficient you might want to make the subapp only load the level when you get in range of it and close that level when you're out of range again




Another remarkably easy way to do it is to just make each level have a border that looks like the previous level. So in each level, you might see 240 pixels that match up exactly the same as the previous level, and you just switch levels halfway through them, so it gives the impression of not having done anything but pausing to load for a fraction of a second as you cross the boundary.

Streaming loading is nothing new, and its just the same task in MMF2 as it is in any other language. If you're familiar with the concept, it shouldn't be any more difficult

[Televangelist]

I believe Sonic the Headghog is updated on the fly, the level is generated, it's not already a big map filled in.

You mean the Sonic Worlds MMF2 engine specifically?

[Televangelist]

Televangelist: I'm not entirely sure you understand how a custom level editor would work. Essentially, you use a custom editor so you can export the position of your level data (and their properties) to a file that stores all that data. Then your game would load in that data when it needs it. It is a simple enough concept, but not very simple to implement if you are new to MMF or coding in general. There are lots of level editor examples floating around if you want to research how to approach making one. Just do a search in the forums. But also keep in mind that the "seamless" levels you see in other games are just tricks. No game really loads in everything at one time. It is up to you as a game maker to figure out the clever tricks that make people think your game is seamless.

I fully understand what seemingly-seamless levels actually entail -- but you're right, I don't understand how one goes about building a custom editor in MMF. I have enough experience "around" various types of coding to understand the basic concepts (primarily VB and Perl), and I've done work with various scripting languages and other game creation systems, but I'm not sure in the context of MMF how one would go about creating a custom level editor, which is why I'm poking around at that.

Right now I'm starting with a project idea, and then poking around to try and determine the best middleware for that project; I've looked at Construct (and the proposed direction of Construct 2), MMF2, and GM8, and as best I can tell MMF2 comes the closest to offering me the features I'm looking for in a form that I could reasonably hope to exploit (in other words, even if I could theoretically code everything we're talking about here in C++, I wouldn't reasonably be learning C++ for this project).

So until I take the plunge, commit to MMF2, and buy a license, I can only ask abstract questions to try and understand exactly what would go into making a custom level editor for MMF2 -- I don't have the software in front of me to play around with.

Your last sentence though sort of hits the point directly:

It is up to you as a game maker to figure out the clever tricks that make people think your game is seamless.

I'm fully onboard with this -- I'm mainly trying to figure out just how feasible those tricks are with MMF2, and to what extent I'd have to sacrifice design-wise to make those tricks work. The fact that they're tricks is fine; the visual effect of seamlessness is what I'm going for, more than anything.

[Televangelist]

Another remarkably easy way to do it is to just make each level have a border that looks like the previous level. So in each level, you might see 240 pixels that match up exactly the same as the previous level, and you just switch levels halfway through them, so it gives the impression of not having done anything but pausing to load for a fraction of a second as you cross the boundary.

Okay, this is perfect! I didn't realize that MMF2 was this flexible in how you determine under what circumstances a new level should load; a technique like this could work perfectly well. (Especially if the visual distinctions between areas didn't match up with actual level boundaries, so the switch felt more subtle...)

[Pixelthief]

Like all the other languages, everything can be triggered through any sort of events you want. You can have the level change when you exit off a border, or when you're within range of a border, or when you hit a button, or 10 seconds after pressing the Q key, or after the game is finishing calculating a taylor series to approximate PI. Theres no real limits to any of that stuff.

Theres tricks you could use to approximate the same effect while still using the built in MMF2 level editor, or theres stronger and more elegant ways to do it while creating custom levels.


Heck, pasting your tiles through an active picture object, you could simply wipe entire areas and paste/repaste the next sections as you approach them with very little overhead loading from different level files. It wouldn't be "easy" to write- not by the longest stretch, but it would be no harder than doing it in any other language.