I have a potentially game breaking idea.. Do? Not do?
This will delay the game by AT LEAST two months. It’s a major rewrite. But I can do it.
Infinitely large maps.
When you start the game, only the area nearest to the player is generated. When you move closer to the edge of this, more map is generated, and the areas you move away from gets saved to disc. Only areas near the player gets updated, so trees won’t grow far away from you, and farms will stop working.
The world will probably get generated in blocks of 64*64*64 tiles, and it’d be all seamless. You could walk for miles, build a base, then walk back and build another base.
This would be both in singleplayer and multi player.
Advantages:
You will never run out of space.
You will never run out of resources.
Travel between several planes of existance, so “hell” could be a real plane you can visit. And the moon too, possibly!
There could be NPC villages and monster towns.
Truly epic sized multiplayer servers, lasting for a long time.
Disadvantages:
Saved games would grow larger and larger over time. Hard drives are pretty big, so it’s probably not going to be a problem.
The fog would have to get shorter, probably maxed out at around the second longest view distance now.
Multiplayer servers would require a lot of ram unless it constraints players to a certain area. (at least 32 mb per player, probably more, if they’re far away from each other)
No online saving! To share a level you have to manually give it to your friend.
Some slight lag while the game generates or loads the next zone.
http://notch.tumblr.com/VOTE
NOW
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