Hi all, I was wondering if anyone has attempted to do map loading from file in game time. For example, The player can keep walking around a large area (larger than client memory)without load-zones. The client only loads the area that surrounds the player. When the player approachs an edge of known area it unloads map data that is too far and loads new data. If using multithreading this shouldn't slow down the frames per second too much should it?

I've done this with a terrain engine. Using some form of predication (I used direction and distance) you can "guess" what is coming next and start loading the next sector/area slowly for each frame (I didn't use multi-threading). Combined with a LRU cache of existing data this can scale really well...

It only falls apart on really low-end systems, or where you have a huge draw distance and/or fast moving players/objects.

Quote: If using multithreading this shouldn't slow down the frames per second too much should it?

As someone else pointed out in a similar thread, a lot of loading is going to be waiting on the hardware rather than using the CPU, so multi-threading is a good idea.

If you develop an engine with variable "chunk" size, cache-size and time-per-second/frame allocated for loading you can be really clever and scale them all at runtime to find an optimal size. I didn't do this, but I did (for debugging) allocate them key's so I could increase/decrease and find out what the "sweet spot" was.

hth
Jack