Seamless world?

I am making a free roam game (world wise much like a single player mmo)I am going to have a pretty big map. I am making the world like I would an mmo so I am having as low polys as possible should I use zones or have it seamless (1 big zone)? I am worried about it going slow.

 

The question to your answer depends on a number of things, but if you think that it is going to be fairly large, there is no harm breaking it up into zones. You could always enable/disable chunks of the world depending where you are to save resources.

 

Hey Dandy, I am an experienced MMO player (among other things) I think its cool you are making an MMO style world. So I think I have some information that will point you in the right direction. Look at a game like world of war-craft, for many computers it can take 3 minutes to load the entire world but also WoW used almost no shading an no shadows. Plus the textures I believe are in the 128x128 range lol so it inst too hard to load. Now a game like Funcom's age of Conan or Ncsofts Aion are very beautiful worlds and therefore they divide the game into regions. If you look at Conan the regions are surrounded by mountains, water, and impenetrable forest to make it seem more natural. So I'll give you some pictures that will hopefully help you. Other Games you may want to look at are Sacred 2 Fallen Angel which makes great use of impenetrable Forest and impassable mountains, even guild wars may be what you aim for.

 

Pic of Sacred 2 I couldnt fit in first post for some reason.
Pictures of games in order from top, Aion, Guild Wars, Age of Conan, Sacred 2 Fallen Angel
Heres some websites:
http://www.sacred2.com/landingpage/index_en.html
http://uk.aiononline.com/
http://ageofconan.com/
http://www.guildwars.com/

and if u need textures these are free to use in commercial projects and by far the best you can find online killzone 2 one of the best looking games on ps3 uses textures from this website.
http://www.cgtextures.com

-if you have any other questions i'll be happy to try and answer.

 

Unity Pro allows for streaming assets, a terrain is nothing more than an asset just like everything else in the game, and the player never need know that you are loading maps, it is entirely possible in unity while using streaming assets to achieve an endless / seamless world. Just remember memory limits though, your game itself needs to remain < 2 gig of used memory to be actually functional. Some older machines will blow up and run out of memory otherwise.

Best of luck and look forward to seeing your game!

 

I am using indie version. BUt when you said about streaming assests is that like how WoW do it. You're in one zone and then all the adjacent and corner zones are loading whilst you are in the other zone.

And when you say 2gb memory do you mean RAM not disk space it takes up.

@naison - I do use textures from cgtextures.com and they are a great site. thanks anyway though. Do you also think that I shouldn't use shadows or lightmaps?

 

if you develop it like that then yes.
its all up to you how you use asset bundles and async loading etc

 

@Dandy, i think it really comes down to how you want the game to fully be, have you decided on the aion/conan style regions or world of warcraft/sacred 2 world? There are several other places to optimze a game other then simply not using advanced lighting. Personally if your game is a fantasy style world you could use spots of grass, with lower poly count to optimize. As a game like conan or oblivion is so hard to run simply because of the grass. And also control the viewing distance would be another thing, so you could also try using LoD landscaping. (The elder scrolls IV oblivion loves to use this) Personally I enjoyed the Conan/aion style worlds much more (This is an opinion comming from someone who used to make oblivion world mods all day!) it is much easier as a single developer to isolate a single region and fill it with quests and many things to do and simply provide passage to other regions via boat, airship, caravan etc. And since unity can imprort .raw terrain maps you may want to use the following program which can GENERATE A WHOLE FREAKING WORLD FOR YOU TO WORK WITH!!!
http://www.nbos.com/
fractal world generator. you will have to find some setting unity reads to master the program. But it takes about 3 seconds to learn literally and it gives you a world to work from. But I am not gonna just leave you hanging with a random programs check out these tutorials on the Construction set wiki it is obviously oblivion related but it still provides many fundamentals of the program.
http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/WorldBuilding_101#World_Building_101
http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/Fractal_terrain
I hope you can extract some useful information from those links
But as I said Normal Maping, object decimating (if you use blender), and single region/cell loading is easier to handle as a single developer and doesnt make making a massive world an impossible dream. So keep thinking of your vision and deal with your regions one step at a time! = )

P.S (edit note) World of Warcraft does not use a streaming client although you may download it separately as a WoW streaming Client. But Warhammer Online has a streaming client that alot more people use. But the default game is not a streaming client, so basically streaming clients are iffy can pose alot of problems in a game. Heres a pic of warhammer online
http://www.warhammeronline.com/

 

I have found that in mmo's the players gradually get to move faster with potions or items that increase the players speed and therfore make the world seem smaller. So at least in theory having the player walk instead of run means you can half the size of your worlds.