Forums » Help » Over-world level size near that of A Link To The Past

I've been wondering how well an over-world nearly the size of that in LOZ: ALTTP, would work as one large level. Is this even possible without bringing the game to a crawl? Sorry if this is the wrong area for asking.

I just see it as being easier to design the entire over-world in one large level, as opposed to smaller separate levels and linking them together.

I built a game with a huge level and it did not slow down that much. If the tiles are off the screen they aren't drawn.

But I think the logic for the entities' update function is processed, so if you have all the possible entities in your game running around, it could be slow.

Also, if you have any bugs in your code, it's hard to debug. For example, I had a bird entity that in rare situations could hit a tile that caused the whole game to freeze. It was hard to track down which entity was causing which problems.

The solution was to build a small level, a compressed world to test all the situations and entities. I am currently testing all entities in all situations possible in that small world now. When everything works, I'll just have the huge map loaded for the real game.

A Link to the past was 24 screens wide and 16 screens tall.

I have a platformer that was 20 screens wide and 8 tall on my iphone5. It played very smooth, but it didn't have as many entities as LOZ would across the whole over world. The level builder actually was the biggest issue I had, as it would lock up a a lot at times.

The way LOZ plays, it plays like each screen is a separate level anyway, I could imagine that having all those enemies would be a bigger problem then the actual map size once it has loaded up.

Hmm, thanks for the replies that helps me out a bit. I think I'm going to try splitting my over-world into four equal levels and see how it handles the entities that way then.

Stahlman, it would be nice to hear how your test goes.