1.Pro: I love fixed camera because of the ‘tabletop vibe’ it gives off with the intonation that you are sitting on a particular side of the table when, or classic top down vibe is just so nostalgic
Con: Need special feature to look ‘behind’ things (i.e. from another angle)
2.Pro: Prerendered backgrounds are awesome! I can paint all thees pretty trees and stuff… oh how fun it is painting!
2.Con: But… then… I… I cant blowz up the trees in real time!! T_T
Pro: Fully connected world map! No load screen/ ‘break in the fourth wall’ deal!
Actually, Skyrim’s over world is split up into little tiny levels a little less than 200ft (58meters) by 200ft. It uses level streaming to load the next couple “cells” (levels) as you explore.
using lib load to make this kind of cell based loading system, like 1000h described in number 4, is the “best” way to create an open world game.
If you use a fixed camera you can use a mouse over script to make buildings and other view blocking stuff become semi transparent. Or swap them for a floorplan view (no walls).
With prerendered backgrounds you should render trees and other stuff separately, then add them as sprites. That way you can delete them and add a wrecked version when they explode.
As for open worlds, as I’ve said before, it took a team of hundreds of artists 2 years to make all the assets and stuff for skyrim. As an indie developer you have to be realistic about what you can make in the time allocated to each project. Otherwise you’ll never use your time efficiently. Imagine spending 20 years to make a game like skyrim. How good do you think today’s graphics are going to look in 20 years time? even if you are a triple A artist, you’re always working in a medium which is evolving faster than you can develop on your own.
You don’t need to do all the assets, you can either use free assets (good look with that) or buy them. There are a lot of packs for other engines, and I assume that those can also be ported to BGE with some work. This is what indies and small studios do.
I’m not saying you can do something like Skyrim in BGE (or any other engine), alone. That is too much work even if you would have to code only the quests.
Not to change topic, but have you had trouble with crashes/ console errors involving libload/ unload lib when using it for something as dynamic as loading world ‘cells’ like that?
Not Grenzer but no, nothing I couldn’t solve.
(BGECore Framework already implements such system. It also facilities other utils for dynamic loading. However only the system of loading and deforming cells is implemented, the whole editor project is still in early development).
I’ve seen several threads about the problems with lib load. I personally have not had any issues, but I’ve only created a few simple test scenes to check my world loading and unloading. My plan is to split up my terrain once I have finished designing the world’s basic layout and than implementing lib load / lib free. Knowing how the BGE is sometimes, that’s probably when I’ll start having issues.
Still, even if dynamic loading isn’t the best, making a player occasionally sit through a 5-second loading screen (like Oblivion and Morrowind did) occasionally probably isn’t the worst thing you can do as a designer. Perhaps cell loading is just inherently unstable, and that’s why all of Bethesda’s games are so glitchy at release.