An editor question for Max

[DaveyJJ]

Max, we've seen video of the editor in action and know you guys are working on polishing the UI, but I've thought of a question I haven't yet seen addressed.

We (the community here) seem to understand that you can link various world files together to move the player from one locale to another. And you've spoken to the loading time betwen world file issues before (I think--can you remind me) and also moving characters from one world file to another.

But how "big" are these individual world files in terms of the player character scale? Or to ask this in another way, both how "big" a file can you make and how long would it take a character (assuming just perfectly flat terrain with no impediments) to run straight across the world file from one "edge" to another? Or are the optimum world file sizes somehow tied to RAM on a players machine?

I'm just trying to get a sense of how much of the location within a world a single world file can encompass. Understanding that the most useful purpose of a world file (given that none of us have yet played with The Editor yet) seems to be to define locations within your game ... e.g., one world file for a town, one for the desert outside it, one for the cave complex at the far edge of the desert, one for the swamp south of the town, etc.

And finally, what should we be calling our creations in your mind? Scenarios? Games? Modules?

[Max]

The "world" encompasses the entire area that you can visit in the game. It can be as large as you like, so there's no need to link multiple world files together. A world is made up of many levels which store the actual terrain. I believe each level file has a maximum size of 1024x1024 meters in size, however for Titan Quest most of our levels are 128x128 or 256x256 meters. You can have as many levels in your world as you want -- in the Titan Quest world there are hundreds.

The levels aren't explicitly connected, you just arrange them next to each other in the Editor and they appear as one big area in both the Editor and in the game. Once they're arrange next to each other you can basically ignore the fact that they are two separate levels since all of the editing operations work seamlessly across the boundaries.

The linking tool only comes into play when you want to connect an aboveground and an underground. Abovegrounds and undergrounds don't actually sit next to each other in the world. Instead they have a virtual connection to each other which you setup with the linking tool. When you play the game it looks like they're connected, but by keeping the connection virtual the underground doesn't have to obey the laws of normal space. The allows you to have the interior of a building be much larger than the exterior, or have the distance between two points in the underground be much shorter than the same distance in the aboveground.

I like to think of the things you can create with the toolset as mods, since they can utilize and modify assets from the main game as well as introduce new suonds, art, objects, maps, etc. In the game they are technically called custom quests though.

Max

[DaveyJJ]

Many thanks for explaining that! I had to read it twice but now have a much better grasp of the basic mechanics. I guess my confusion was arising from the fact that when we've seen the editor working in the various dev diaries and other grainy movies, we've seen only small worlds being created.

The one I'm specifically thinking of if the recent one where you see a "Y" shaped river being created with puppy dog (you have cats, too, right??) next to a small hut at the river's edge with two boats.

So from your description I've assumed that specific example is one "world" file consisting of a only a single average sized level (256x256 or 128x128) where the editing is taking place.

Thanks again. I think I'm looking more forward to the editor than to the game itself actually (that's my B.A. double major in historical geography and fine art coming into play I guess). I'm sure that makes you guys working on the editor portion of the game happy.