Hey guys. I’m trying to think and figure out a way that certain games achieve their very large and dynamic maps/regions of their game world.
One example is a grand strategy game such as Victoria or Europa Universalis or Hearts of Iron. You have these hundreds or thousands of regions across the world that are all clickable and they’re very dynamic and contain all sorts of information and you can move units into them, from them etc.
Do you have any tips on how game developers tackle something like this? Do they model out their world(as these are typically games with some geometry representing the world), and then cut it all up to have each region be a separate clickable geometry or maybe store triangle data in a lookup table from the larger whole?
The way I tackled this sort of thing in a Craps game I was working on was I had the board be its own model… and I had all sorts of invisible shapes I modeled to fit the areas of the board. I found it to be a fairly inelegant approach and want to rethink this.
Another example is a game like Cities in Motion. This game features all sorts of clickable regions on the map. The buildings are clickable, the roads are separate clickable entities. It seems kind of like a tile based system, and I guess it partially is but things are certainly not uniform in region.
This sort of birds eye view of the structure of specific game mechanics represented in games is what typically gives me trouble. I want to try creating a small little tycoon like business simulation game that borrows some elements of both of these map styles, but I want to see if there are some more elegant approaches.
By the way if anybody thinks they know how games like Cities in Motion handles all the flow of information, tile placement and vehicle movements… I would love to pick your brain.