Try saying “mega map” 10 times fast! This week’s Around the Verse does indeed cover the heck out of Star Citizen’s mega map. Lead Gameplay Programmer Rob Johnson says that the intent of the mega map is to eliminate — or at least reduce — the annoyance of loading screens.
“We load the Mega Map as we would a standard map. The Mega Map itself is empty, but once the Mega Map is loaded, we actually start to fill the Mega Map with content of various game modes, fire, and object containers. So, we would load the Mega Map, which is empty; load the front end, which is a set of object containers; [and] load the front-end game rules, which tells the game how to work in that game mode. The user would then pick a new game mode to play. At that point we throw away all the object containers. We throw away the game mode, [then] load in the Free Fly game mode and the Dying Star object containers, but we do that via streaming rather than a complete level load, so we are able to shave the vast majority of the load time down to a few seconds rather than long enough to warrant a load screen.”
ATV also catches up with the LA studio’s work on ship production, multifunction displays, the room system, and the “entity owner manager” — critical for the persistent experience. Listen up below.
