Damned if you do... separating inside and outside levels

News & General Discussion
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Hello, I’m fairly new to Unity and still exploring the possibilities - not quiet ready yet to create that wow-killer mmo with nameless cool features and uber graphics ;D

I’m rather enjoying myself laying out terrains for my first level. And of course no level is complete without a scenic town of some sort. And a town means people. Lots of people. And lots of people (including NPCs) means a heavy load on your cpu, graphics card and networking.

Now the obvious solution to this would be to create interior levels which have their own resources server-side. Basically an instanced world. However if you do that, you loose the interactions that are possible between outside and inside, such as shooting from a window, or climbing up a wall and breaking into a house through the window (I still remember this feature from The Elder Scroll’s ‘Daggerfall’).

So this is one of your ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ situations. Either you cut up your world and pack it into tiny boxes but that will kill the ‘big world’ feeling and make the creation of a town that’s actually bristling with life impossible.
Or you have one huge level which will turn into a slide show fps-wise (“Jita” for EVE players :wink: ) which will also be a partystopper.

I was wondering what any of you might be thinking about this. I obviously haven’t created a level in Unity yet so I have no idea how big of a problem this really is, but if it is then this will obviously affect how to set up levels - which is what I’m working on right now.

Any ideas, comments, thoughts or criticism (except ‘start with a pong game’ or ‘use the ‘G’ search engine’) would be very welcome. Cheers o/

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Run the ai thats not in sight of a player on a low level, freeing up CPU time for other stuff.

Some good articles about how to do this on the web, one I remember about is neverwinter nights way of runing far away npcs on low priority so they only ran if you had the cpu time.

The rest of the game world you could stream in and out as the player moves around.

Another game to look at is the old DungenSiege, it had a massive seamless world with no loading times massive dungens and other places. It also is pretty old so they did this with less cpu/gpu resources and it looked extreamly well for that time.

Infos out there just got to find it. (part of designing your game)

Think most of these were/are on http://www.gamasutra.com/