World size in SRTT and SRIV

N

nivao

I've been wondering exactly what the maximum size of the game world is. I've read in a topic that there is a maximum size of the havok world, meaning anything outside would not have physics (much like the Unreal Engine), but how big in "real" units would that be?

What I try to determine is if it would be possible to build a facade beyond the gameplay borders (with the message that you need to return to Steelport) to give the illusion that the city is part of the mainland rather than an island in a infinite ocean (a bit like Mafia II and Mercenaries 2).

What I also wonder is where are the maps of the bank in the first mission, the Hughes Memorial Bridge and Mars? I think I've read somewhere that they are just locations hidden from the normal game world. But is it possible to have more than one world? Like having Steelport and Stilwater in two separate maps and the game simply loads the other map when you "travel" there.
 
nivao said:
I've been wondering exactly what the maximum size of the game world is. I've read in a topic that there is a maximum size of the havok world, meaning anything outside would not have physics (much like the Unreal Engine), but how big in "real" units would that be?

What I try to determine is if it would be possible to build a facade beyond the gameplay borders (with the message that you need to return to Steelport) to give the illusion that the city is part of the mainland rather than an island in a infinite ocean (a bit like Mafia II and Mercenaries 2).

What I also wonder is where are the maps of the bank in the first mission, the Hughes Memorial Bridge and Mars? I think I've read somewhere that they are just locations hidden from the normal game world. But is it possible to have more than one world? Like having Steelport and Stilwater in two separate maps and the game simply loads the other map when you "travel" there.
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I don't think that Steelport and Stillwater would fit next to eachother inside the gameplay borders.
 
I didn't say ONE map, I asked if it was possible to have TWO SEPARATE maps (or "levels" if you want the classic name). Then the game loads the second "level" when the players visits the airport or seaport for example. Traditional games (such as CoD) load different levels which are commonly referred to as "maps". Normal open world games use only one "map" which contains the entire world. I wondered if Saints Row can support multiple "maps". I didn't want to put the two cities together.
 
nivao said:
I didn't say ONE map, I asked if it was possible to have TWO SEPARATE maps (or "levels" if you want the classic name). Then the game loads the second "level" when the players visits the airport or seaport for example. Traditional games (such as CoD) load different levels which are commonly referred to as "maps". Normal open world games use only one "map" which contains the entire world. I wondered if Saints Row can support multiple "maps". I didn't want to put the two cities together.
Click to expand...

Oh like that. I thought you meant that when you went to far in the sea steelport would dissapear and stillwater would appear. Alright then, but I don't think that will be possible. You get one city and all other smaller maps like the bank from the first mission, deckers.die map, mars,... are included in steelport. But you have to enable them in a lua file and go to the exact location for them to appear, mostly in the sea around steelport. If the maps would be loaded in an entirely different world that would change things.

But perhaps someone from Volition can prove different though. I personally would find it incredible if we could get both maps working in one game.
 
If I remember, this came up before and they noted some tricks possible, that while the outer bounds are set (and certain tricks like say the Stilwater mission from the third game are hard-coded to do stuff we can't normally do) it is possible to stuff things up into the top or bottom of the map, since the bounding 'box' is stupidly high above and below height limits. Also can stick things off at sea way up where they won';t be noticed from the 'Steelport' map, yet still have skybox above. Unfortunately, there isn't enough room there to stick the entire Stilwater map. Though if you stuffed it high above the entire map and used some trickery to swap about what's loaded and what isn't... of course then coop if they're in different 'cities' it'd be visible above the other... probably at least.

But if we could somehow manage maps.. I suspect this though is more to do with the game design, and everything is one big map, for assorted reasons from rendering to loading in memory (and particularly for co-op purposes).. and then of course it cuts down on any map-loads.

I'm gonna guess the ship and all the Zin stuff is stuffed somewhere off to the side or under the map as needed... but if there was a possibility to have the two maps separate, you'll probably have to figure a way to make sure they aren't both loaded at once or something. I'm gonna guess 'not a chance' but I really wanna see Volition say "No reason we can't" as opposed to "Sorry, no".
 
The havok world is [-3000, -500, -3000] to [3000, 3500, 2700]. That's a pretty big world, but I remember having to bump the world up so it wasn't centered around the origin in order to get the stupid big skyscapers to fit. :) We do support multiple levels on an engine level, but not so much on a gameplay level. During development we have a lot of test levels and thing we create and we can just load any level we want, but things like the gamesave system are oblivious to such things. As a result, we opt to go with things like hidden volumes in the world for things like Pleasantville for SR4 or the bank mission from SR3.
 
[V] Knobby said:
The havok world is [-3000, -500, -3000] to [3000, 3500, 2700]. That's a pretty big world, but I remember having to bump the world up so it wasn't centered around the origin in order to get the stupid big skyscapers to fit. :) We do support multiple levels on an engine level, but not so much on a gameplay level. During development we have a lot of test levels and thing we create and we can just load any level we want, but things like the gamesave system are oblivious to such things. As a result, we opt to go with things like hidden volumes in the world for things like Pleasantville for SR4 or the bank mission from SR3.
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Test levels? Those would be interesting to see. Is there any way of accessing them now, or any screenshots or anything?
 
No, we don't ship with any test levels. Most of them are pretty old and broken most of the time. We have a flat plane world that is the defacto test level, but most people have made a test level at some point during development specifically to check out their feature or thing and then it sits around and decays to the point of not loading by the end of the project. :) There is a pretty cool effects test level, but it's just a bunch of things lined up that have effects on them like traffic lights, street lights, mailboxes, etc.
 
[V] Knobby said:
The havok world is [-3000, -500, -3000] to [3000, 3500, 2700]. That's a pretty big world, but I remember having to bump the world up so it wasn't centered around the origin in order to get the stupid big skyscapers to fit. :) We do support multiple levels on an engine level, but not so much on a gameplay level. During development we have a lot of test levels and thing we create and we can just load any level we want, but things like the gamesave system are oblivious to such things. As a result, we opt to go with things like hidden volumes in the world for things like Pleasantville for SR4 or the bank mission from SR3.
Click to expand...

Do you mean that if we can make custom maps, we can technically make multiple maps and use for example the developer console to load them, but that when the game saves, it won't save the currently loaded map? Or is it simply impossible with the mod tools we get?

Or, on a more time consuming note, we use the hidden volumes method to hide one city and unhide the next? Well, that would mean we as modders need to have a lot of time scripting that and I don't know how easy it is to modify the AI pathing and other interactive objects like cribs to match the other maps. This is only something I wonder about, not something we really need but it would be nice.

On another side-note, I don't think the world is big enough to support a map like GTA San Andreas, is it? Or Just Cause 2 if I may exaggerate? I'm not sure how those coordinates fit in real-world measurements. If we use the default character size as reference, what are the width, length and height in kilometers (I work with the metric system)?
 
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