One feature I'd really love to have builtin is the ability to wrap maps. When you get near the edge of the map, instead of stopping the camera, it repeats the map tile pattern at the edges and lets you walk around the edges provided no obs at the spot you're walking to.
A second feature is seamless transitioning between maps. Instead of switching maps, have up to 8 maps surrounding your current map that are known ahead, but make it so the VSP for each is only required to be loaded when the player is approaching the edge of the map. To save overhead, make it have a prediction mechanism to tell if it needs to begin loading the VSP ahead.
These are both two things Kildorf demoed a while ago, but both are very hacky, and could stand to be done a lot more efficiently by being builtin to the map system.
His wrapping was simply teleporting you to another spot in the map. His seamless transitioning required the whole map as two seperate files, each was identical save for zone and entity information.
Seamless transition has some small roadblocks, however:
- If you modify curmap.tileset to dim tiles or something, how would you do it for other maps?
- What's the most efficient way to do prediction when it's 2D
- What about entities other than the player on seperate maps, how would it handle them? :/
Despite these issues, it would be very awesome for a large scale platformer to be able to split maps into chunks, and not need to have transitions between each map, or hacky padding around each map. I dunno, maybe seamless map transitioning is a little too complex. However, I know wrapping maps could come in handy for anyone doing an RPG. Comments?
