Map size/management?

[Sammy_D]

I’m curious to know how big the entire map is for Orbus and how the devs created this (i.e. I know it’s 9km in total, but is each zone on a different server or is it one giant 9km single map that the players all run around at the same time)?

I played around with creating a very basic VR multiplayer map in UE4 for an exploration ‘game’, but even at 6km x 6km it was so slow that it was unplayable. And that wasn’t even with a lot of players. And with about 50% of the map being empty terrain/ocean space between continents/islands. I can’t imagine how slow it would have been with a full world with loads of items populating it and people running about.

So how are games like Orbus managing the map space? Is there a maximum map size for VR multiplayer games that anyone is aware of?

[J11]

From playing the game I can say that there are 6 main over world zones which have loading screens in orbus whereby you are loaded in to a ‘shard’ upon entry. Highsteppe town, highsteppe outside zone, lamavora, flooded rainforest, wastelands, Hulthines basin. Generally these are all of similar size. There are also 4 dungeons of similar size (sewers, crypt, airship, broken halls). A new shard is also spawned every time a new player zones in to a dungeon. A ‘shard’ can be described as a multiplayer instance of a zone whereby there is a 60(?) player cap before a new shard is initialized and spawned.

other optimization tricks

• upon getting closer to objects, extra details are loaded in.
• around 100 yards, enemies, loot bags and other players are loaded in.

Generally it is not the ‘size’ that matters in terms of the overworld but the loaded polygon count and the asyncronous tasks running as to how much load the server can handle. You can download an interactive map here if you want to gauge the size of the world.

Any other questions you’d have to ask the devs about.

[Sammy_D]

Ok, I found a Wiki entry saying something similar. So I’m guessing each zone/server/shard map is only about 1km rather than 9km, which makes more sense. I’ll try experimenting with smaller individual 1km zones on my map and see how it responds then. Thanks for the help! : )