Making bigger maps (Changing the map size) (Doing the impossible!) - Developers

I know this has been brought up a million times before. But would there be any way to make super large maps that could go on forever... Could you do something like: Have many different maps and when you go into a "different map" it will take you to another map (Not ideal and would require some loading unless you could make all the maps load before the game starts. you could then have an exact copy of another part of the map and you wouldn't even notice you had changed map.) (It would also cause MASSIVE file sizes!) Everyone says it's impossible... But there must be some logical way for gmod to accept maps? Just think of the possibilities, you could have multiple city's and it would make roleplaying much more realistic.

Scaling players and props is a thing.

I know you can have really big maps as long as they are good optimized. So the client does not render more then needed. for example just by clever placed area portals

I have never seen this done with any map/server before! so I was wondering if anyone had figured out how to do it? People say it's impossible... But nothings impossible!

[QUOTE=MoltoCraft;45332306]I have never seen this done with any map/server before! so I was wondering if anyone had figured out how to do it? People say it's impossible... But nothings impossible![/QUOTE] There are actual limitations to the engine. So there is a limit to what it can handle in its current state. There are ways to fake larger areas once this limit is hit(phasing, scaling, changing maps etc etc) but I haven't seen anything that most would consider clean or nice.

The limits in place are not purely to do with rendering. I can't remember exactly what the limitations were, but I think garry mentioned coordinates could only be 32 bits long without changing some of the networking code. I will try and find you a quote from garry explaining. [u]Edit:[/u] [quote] People sometimes ask me to make maps bigger. As if it’s that easy.. Jut change a variable right? Well. No. First of all you break compatibility with every other source engine game. Then you need to ship your own version of hammer, vis, vbsp, vrad etc.. Then you need to change all the network code to support the bigger coord system (every coord would now use more bits). Then you’ve got to think of the ramifications of having bigger maps. For things like flatgrass it’s fine.. But there’s a reason maps are a limited size. If the maps twice the size, that’s twice the lightmaps, twice the ai nodes, twice the entites, twice the vis data, twice the env cubemaps. So loading your map takes twice the memory, and is twice the size. We now have 600mb maps. And finally… Why bother? Yeah it sucks that you can’t build a to scale 747 and simulate an 8 hour flight from London to new York, but do you really need to. [/quote] [url=http://garry.tv/2012/08/17/make-maps-bigger/]From some random guy who thinks he can code.[/url]

I always imagined you could have multiple servers hosting different 'districts' of a map with SQL for data persistance. Just an idea though, don't know how well it would work.

Obviously you could check someones X and Z (I think Z is the depth axis in garrysmod?), when they get to the end of the map, it's loads the next map according to their area. But that's horrible, worse then Skyrim with all the loading screens. You know how annoying that would be. This couldn't work in a race game, but an RPG maybe, but when I play RPG's I like to explore, so a bunch of loading screens would really piss me off. Point is, yes there are work-arounds. but they are shit and buggy, scaling is buggy and a hacky way, the checking of X and Z to see the next appropriate way would be annoying.

Ok AnonTakesOver, my question now is... How would I make it so it loads a new area when you pass a certain area! (For example will I need multiple servers or could 1 server load all the maps?) You could then go on to make some kind of "Nuclear Apocalypse roleplay server" or "Zombie Survival" but I don't know how exacly it would be achievable.

You'd need a different server for every map, and you could load the next district using triggers.

Is it possible to hide servers from the server list? Because you will just see 80 servers that belong to me when people search "mysever"

not sure if this is helpful [URL="http://facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=1179652"]http://facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=1179652[/URL]

Name them something dumb and password protect.

Why not just make the client static and move the map around them as they move?

@Blasphemy Wut?!?

[QUOTE=MoltoCraft;45334142]@Blasphemy Wut?!?[/QUOTE] Doesn't make sense... what would be the benefit plus that sounds hard as fuck. How in anyway would that improve the map size. Sounds stupid. Unless I'm missing something or not understanding what he is suggesting.