What's up, RMers?

[Kain Nobel]

A little inside baseball on how the World Map system in my game works and is designed...

It is officially canon that our heroes live on a round ball globe planet of sorts, as it is depicted in-game. As far as how it is represented in raw map tree data, well that's a different story...



The map tree data has the planet planned and organized as a cube. Six regions; 1 North and 1 South Pole region, 2 Western Regions, 2 Eastern Regions. The region maps are fairly large and everything comes together like a classic Zelda map. To evenly break up any one of the East/West regions, you'd have 9 maps grouped 3x3, but sometimes zones are taller or wider than such. In other words, sizes vary but maps overall are standardized.



Regions have a 24 hour solar cycle, divided into 12 time zones representing 2 in-game hours each, with the sun rising in the East and setting in the West, quite similar to here on Earth. The sky tone (used in overworld battle backgrounds) is set based on a color graph programmed for each hour (or overridden by a weather setting.) Weather is randomized within allowed parameters for each region and queued up every game hour. I've yet to create a useful visual forecast system, but the data is indeed generated ahead of time for each region. Some places are always rainy, some occasionally snowy, others consist of bone dry deserts and have 1/256th of a chance getting rain.



What I haven't created yet, but am looking forward to doing, is the underwater submarine sections. The submarine gets pressure load upgrades as the game progresses, allowing it to go 1, 2 or a whole 3 layers deep into the underwater ocean. I don't plan on getting as elaborate with the underwater section as I do with the surface, as I think the submarine will be isolated within a certain boundary between continents or something, probably locked within the eastern hemisphere region. For now, everything underwater is low on my priorities list so this may or may not make it into the end game. We'll see...