Not quite like farmville but in a way yes. The world in any form whether topdown, first person or isometric would be blocked off by a not so invisible wall that a character can go through but will have a 99.99999999% chance of dying if they do unless they run thier happy *** back to the safe side of said wall very fast thus limiting how far from the current playable area they can goto. With expansions and new content said wall will move further back revealing more of the world and more content which at that time would expand the game size on disk but not size in memory since the individual player would still only load what is near them and using a method of background processing like the X Series by egosoft very basic calculations will be done in background either on server in case of multiplayer or on pc in case of single player to determine how the unseen area’s NPC’s have acted over time and where they should be and what they should be doing should the character ever go there. These unreleased areas would be just basic minimally textured landmasses that have shape but no content like buildings or plants or even npc’s. But the shape is there so whichever direction we decide to expand the game on that living world it will forever match the size and shape of the released world map. This map is also the basis of a series of intended games to be released and as such we want the map to be forever cohesive and usable in any portion or entirety. Example being a transocean-esque game but since it’s a fantasy world would be fantasy ships or traders running around on the map but with greatly reduced detail levels as a player would never zoom into the character level and always be in a satellite view. IN this picture:
You can see the entirety of the shape. This was a very early on design map and originally meant to be 100x the size of the current proposed map as the original world was designed for textbased and was meant to represent the actual size of asia in real life. Due to scope and playability in graphics and transit times the size was reduced several times to the current proposed level and because this will one day also become an MMO intended to have full AR/VR the world is designed for total player immersion and grandscale kin to the idea of playing Eve Online where the galaxy is so large that some players may choose never to leave one part of the galaxy for the entirety of the time they play the game and they will never be capped because they didn’t follow along the prescribed zones of enemies and events in order to level ala WoW and WoW clones. This means if a player decides they wanna live in Dominion and never ever leave that province they will never run out of things to do because that province is an all encompassing environment unto it’s self and every province on that map is the same with weaker enemies and envirnoments being found closer to the capitals where the governents keep things safer and more diverse stuff being out near the fringes of provinces.
The 60km2 island in question is the island in Dominion which is the grey province. Where the number 1 is drawn is the north island and the one below it acrossed the river is the south island. The island I tried working with as initial area for release in the singleplayer game and probably for the MMO as well is the south island. Getting this to work within the bounds of UE4 is really my first obstacle since the orange bounds box cuts off the east and west edges of that island.
Please help me atleast get the island working to start with here and then in time perhaps I can figure out how to make numerous world bounds and have player minizone acrossed them or find a way to expand or move said world bound around the larger map as a whole.