Zone based rpg map design

So I'm making a 3d large world rpg game. A lot of my design choices are filtered by what makes the game easier to make for a small team, and it should play on current gen mobile devices. So while the world is large there are zones, and the camera angle is isometric.

The game has land and sea travel FYI.

What I'm hung up on is whether to have continents or just a lot of islands. I don't want to get off track on the details but terrain shorelines that span multiple terrains is problematic. It's doable but I'd rather avoid it.

If I stick with lots of islands, then sea/land travel are not at the same scale really. Travel is key to the game. The best 'stuff' is usually a longer trip through several zones of varying difficulty. If all I have are islands, then it becomes more of a sea based game which I really don't want.

One idea I had was to have portals. So I could have my continents but they never meet the ocean anywhere. You would take a portal to them. Portal from an island, or even a portal from the ocean to a large inland lake maybe. That is the best idea I have so far to have large landmasses but avoid the most difficult challenges associated with shorelines that span multiple terrains.

The issue with portals is I have no reason for why they exist. Probably solvable but this is a game with no obvious/direct magic to speak of. The time period is loosely based on early roman empire. I was going to have religions, so I might be able to leverage that, portals of the gods or something to that effect.

Thoughts, ideas?

 

Have you considered Baldur's Gate esque maps?
A travel map and isolated zones (traditional levels)

 

The Mediterranean has lots of islands. Just saying, in case it helps you opt for islands.

What about barriers that prevent the player from walking the coastline across zone transitions? For example, a shipwreck beached on the coast, so the player has to walk inland a little bit to get around it. Or a stretch of steep, jagged rocks at the zone edge.

 

How about camouflaged portals? You enter a boat, brief skippable travel cut-scene, you leave the boat on a different island. No magic, but no player time wasted

 

That works, it's when you are at sea, on the boat that I can't think of an easy way to represent those obstacles. Let's say we just put an invisible wall there. The other challenge is what to show when you are close enough to the terrain border that you could see the adjacent terrain. Low poly mesh version of it, maybe cut so it's just the side of the terrain. But then you have issues like the terrain shader works on meshes also but not normals, so it looks different. And all the details and objects.

That said if I could find some tricks to make that work (without a lot of work), it would solve my problems in a preferable way. I am *completely* open to Illusions/visual tricks here.

 

Ya I like that idea. I'm actually using something similar at sea. Where there are island terrains that you can't land on, but waterways through them that lead to a spot where you zone. Never dawned on me to use the same basic technique on land.

 

Are you loading only the next adjacent zone or some n neighboring zones? I'd think that it would look fine if you were loading a few zones out (with smaller zones), and using LOD to render farther zones with much less detail.

 

I'm not loading any neighbor terrains at all.

I was trying to avoid loading more then one terrain at a time, so that it could work well on current gen mobile devices. But it might be worth revisiting that. two 1024 terrains is not actually that bad even if you are right at the border of them. But there is a base cost per terrain that is not entirely insignificant. It might be worth looking at what else I could realistically optimize for mobile to get more breathing room to allow for an additional terrain. I'm assuming that I would probably need 3 terrains max at distance while at sea, but only two with any real level of detail for the worst case.

Inland none of this is an issue, or rather easily solved.

 

Why no magic?
Early Roman were totally convinced magic existed didnt they?

Is your issue loading different zones while at sea or blocking the player from progressing into another zone at sea?
If the latter - wasnt the earth flat back in those times with hugh waterfalls at the ends?

 

I have a notion of religions and subtle magic, just not direct/obvious. No magic missiles flying around.

The main issue is how to handle the shoreline. Even if I added boundaries on land, how would you extend those out into the water? And even if I could, not sure I would want that.

So just having a bunch of single terrain islands solves that problem, by avoiding it. But I still want larger land masses. So my best idea was you can port to those. And those don't have shorelines, you can never reach the ocean from them except for taking some kind of portal back out to an island or ocean.

Do like the waterfall idea. Could use that to bound off the oceans themselves.

 

If you're on sea, and there's magic in your world, why not bring players back from the edge by some sort of magical whirlwind or maelstrom?