Hello community!
We are currently in the process to port over all of our assets and systems to HeroEngine, but I am wondering what your experience would say what the best solution is to my current issue.
In the attachment, you will find 3 potential scenario's for our seamless world grid. The game itself is based on an island structure: the player will travel from island to island to discover new abilities, new quests, and so forth. Hence, I believe that most area-load would be on those islands. What would the best option be?
Scenario #1:
Each Area consists of only 1 heightmap. Both in the X and Y direction, we will start expanding. Each heightmap will have 1 area server (a la 15MB of RAM on average on the server).
Scenario #2:
The island will be built on a single heightmap in the area, with 8 surrounding heightmaps creating a nice and even area which can be seamlessly linked in a better way. The other area's, which won't have a lot of players, consists of one large heightmap and an ocean the same size of a standard island-area.
Advantages: we are increasing the size of an area which isn't highly populated and we do have a whole area server for a single island. The RAM on the area server, if an area if 4 times as large but less populated would be less than 4x15=60MB. When there's less populated placed, increasing it size would be rational if game-design requires it so.
Disadvantage: ?
Scenario #3:
We will create a single area with a single heightmap which only has the island. We would then be creating L-shaped area's with 2 heightmaps that go around an island-area. The blue waves indicate the ocean.
Advantage: the island-area is smaller, and thus the world server can concentrate more on that island.
Disadvantages: ?
I would love to have your input on our area design concepts! We believe that most of the time, the player will start exploring the area's at the bottom of the sea and will visit islands solely to trade goods and do quests. Quests of course will be handled by a different system area, and thus won't have a large impact on the island-area server.
My plan is option 3 due to server load and player-management.
Kind regards,
Dwight