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[The Transcendent Tyrant]

So, I saw an article on the various sizes of game worlds. The trouble was, the guy who wrote the article put the game worlds into miles^2, which just seems wrong. It didn't take into account average travel speed (because there's a lot of trouble inbetween games), nor the fact that a lot of creatures travel very quickly in fantasy games.

This is a problem, because it's just a measurement of game world in terms of size (hell, sticking together all of Black & White's maps might make it the biggest because of the midget creatures) that have NO ACTUAL RELATION TO GAME SIZE.

So, how, gentlemen, would we all measure the size of a game world?

I'm thinking it should depend on how fast your average character moves. If, in WoW, the game world is 5000 miles across and a character walks at 5 miles per minute (or whatever), it'd work out to a game size (in a single direction) of 1000 character travel minutes or something like that. In another game, let's say Just Cause 2, the game world is 10,000 miles across and a character walks at 0.5 miles per minute, then the game world is 20,000 character travel minutes across.

Now, the question is how to do this to include unclimbable mountains etc, and I honestly have no idea.

Any comments, ladies and gents?

[a1s]

The question depends on what you are trying to get out of the measurement. If you just want to know how far everything is, you can use the measurement from the article: WoW is 25 million square miles, Fallout is 100 million, Master of orion is 400 square light years. You can use your metric right there: WoW is 16 travel hours wide, Fallout is 5 travel minutes wide (that's at the average rate of random encounters, and assuming your character is of a proper level to do so), and a given level of DOOM is 20 travel minutes wide. MoM game-world is either infinitesimal (click on your colony on the other side of the map, and you're there!), or possibly quite big seeing as how it will take your ships 5-10 turns to do so, and turns tend to take more than 10 minutes on average. I prefer to measure game-worlds by how much stuff there's in them, which once you carry all the ones, and dot all the Ts corresponds very closely to 'hours of gamaplay', a metric we already have.

[alway]

IIRC, WoW is actually only a few dozen square miles. The vanilla lands are relatively small, with the two x-pacs doubling or tripling that total. However, they did manage to fit quite a lot in there; if you go around the areas, there is actually very little open land unused by quests.

Outside of the sim genre, there actually aren't that many done to scale. Mostly because traveling 20 hours to get to your quest location is a bit much for most players. Most first person games, though, will have a defined size which may or may not be used as an advertising opportunity. Far Cry 2's number was 50 square km iirc. Outside of first person games, size is entirely irrelevant in almost every case.

[Ozyton]

ARMA2's Chernarus is 225^2 km, and vehicle movement is measured in km/h . I don't really know the movement speed of someone on foot, but I think I heard that all units are about 6 feet tall and at a jogging pace move at slightly above average speed (moreso when sprinting, but if you sprint for a few seconds you slow to a jog, and eventually slower than a jog)

So... it would take a very... very long time to travel across the map on foot. I don't think any mission exists that has you traversing the entirety of the map on foot, though there are some that have you operate in a rather large area only using captured trucks for transport. (One mission has you crashed landed in the woods and you have to make your way behind enemy lines to the shore several KM away to safety... at night.)

So even if the map is that big usually a mission only takes place in a small portion, though if vehicles are involved the mission may take up a much, much larger portion of the map.

[smjjames]

DF has the problem even worse because of the abstract nature of tiles. Vertical distance is somewhat better defined though.

[MrWiggles]

What about just using pixels or polygon count for distances?

[Soulwynd]

In that case, you might be better off defining it as world detail. The more polygons and elements a world has, the bigger it is. Which is not far from true, HDD space-wise and in terms of computer resources needed to run it.

You can easily make a earth-sized world with a few thousands polygons and say it's the biggest world, but would severely lack in details even if the walking speed/time taken to go to one point to another was akin to earth-values. It would still be a crappy shitty barren world.

[Calhoun]

Sure, but you could also generate a nice HUGE world procedurally, a la FUEL.

Hell, Daggerfall did it, That world is Insanely huge, 'course, all the towns are pretty much the same. Limits of the time period mostly though.

[KaguroDraven]

Even if you go by travel time Daggerfall is huge, supposedly it takes roughly 2 weeks real time to get from one end of the map to the other, in a straight line as much as possible.

[MrWiggles]

Okay then, what if we limit the poly count to that of a collision detection model for area on a horizontal plane. This should just count areas where the player can stand and probably transverse, without counting the makeup of walls or misc. game objects.

[Tilla]

Desert Bus ftw

[Sowelu]

A very big game.

[lordcooper]

A very big game.

I want.

[qwertyuiopas]

The terrain in some game enines can loop forever. Does that count as infinite size, if the players are able to interact with the world (like construction in a RTS, or making a fort out of crates) anywhere?

[Sowelu]

I don't think anyone mentioned Noctis yet...It's bigger than Hazeron by a long shot.  GINORMOUS GALAXY.  You can fly around pretty much freely, too, and just..keep..going.  I think someone spent an RL day getting far enough from the core that stars got really sparse.  And considering you can pass, well, lots and lots of stars as you fly around...

(You point at a little dot somewhere through your windshield, say 'go there', and you do.)

It's meaningfully big, too.  You can log the name of any star you visit, or any planet or moon, and leave notes about them that (used to be) other people can download.  Billions and billions, friend.

Both Noctis and Starflight let you roam around on the planet surface in similar ways (well, Starflight isn't first-person).  But Starflight only has on the close order of a hundred stars.  Noctis has way, way more.  OTOH, Starflight has more complexity (~40 critter types, aliens to interact with, artifacts to find...) while Noctis, though each planet is indeed still random, is quite uniform.  Which is really bigger?