So, i’m trying to figure out a solution for my game. I have a forest, and its open to explore, but i don’t want players to reach the edge and fall off. I also dont want to place water around the edge so it looks like an island, and I dont want a mountain range around it. Invisible walls feel a little odd. Does anyone have a solution to it? I was thinking of having the left and right edges merge so that if you walk on the left side of the map, you come out the right, but idk how since the terrain is very uneven. If anyone have suggestion i’d love to hear or how they might be accomplished. I’m only learning right now.
You have enumerated almost all solutions!
Though there is another one, “funnel loop”. It’s basically natural edge and obstacle except at the edge of the map you have many corridors the player can enter and basically loop back to main map. So the player feels likes he is always going forward while in truth he is looping back. Bully use a bit of this. The idea is to not have pure dead end nor kilometer of walls, but have some kind of alternate path that feels like I keep moving, that sway and intersect enough to not be boring and not feeling like it’s a simple loop back.
Example: the player got to a cliff, if he falls down he dies, that’s the edge of the world, ocean till the distance … but there is a little path that seems like it goes beyond down the cliff, so it feels like you can progress, the path soon enter a cavern, the cavern lead back the player in the middle of the forest but a place where he has a pov to a path he had already took, but see things that was hidden from that path and maybe a new path, the player is rewarded with increase knowledge of the world, forget he couldn’t go further.
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As you’re new, I would recommend keeping it simple — just put natural barriers around the edge of your forest. You can make it less obvious by mixing these up: impassable brambles here, a 12-foot cliff (which wouldn’t be visible from a distance through the forest) there, a crevasse over there, a big fallen tree yonder. Depending on how much parkour you’ve built into your player controller, this will be easier or harder to do believably. But if your forest is big enough, most players will never find the edge anyway — it’s just a bit of extra insurance.
Another good alternative is to make a truly open world, with a forest that just keeps going on forever, procedurally generating it in chunks as you go. That’s what I would do… but probably not something to tackle as a beginner.
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If it’s all forest, you could have increasing density of trees as you get closer to the border so it gets harder and harder to get to the edge. The edge could be trees so close together you can’t get through or brambles or something like that.
That way you don’t go straight from playable area to border immediately.
Plus it acts as a warning lesson, so the player will probably wander close to the border once and try and get through but will fail. Then the next time they notice it getting harder and harder they will turn back.
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Some good ideas everyone :), I quite like the concept of having a “streaming edge” so you can go as far as you want towards the edge, but conversely remain close the main map, depending on the game.
You could add a game mechanic which says if you walk x distance away from a certain position you die. Or if your game isn’t one based in a realism aesthetic, you could simply have a map edge. Like the game simply has an edge to the map, nothing beyond it.
Witcher 3 contains a buffer zone where if you walk too far towards the edge, the character says something like, “nothing that way.” fade out, fade in with the character facing the opposite direction. Witcher also auto-opens the map so that you can tell where you are and where you’d like to go. A better take on “soft” boundaries.
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You can always mess with distance. Played one game that let you wander out infinitely, yet didn’t increase the distance. So anytime you turned around to come back, you weren’t that far from the main game.
Might work with some game types.
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I would literally think about this in a real world sense. In any forest, if you wander far enough you will run into impassible underbrush, dense trees, etc that will make an impassible edge. I would use the example nature gives. In your case to make it feel more organic, don’t make this a straight edge, but rather a jagged edge. What I mean is varying depths and crevasses to the natural barrier, so the player doesn’t feel like it’s a “wall”, but rather a naturally impassible area with varying depth. I really liked the earlier suggestion of also looping the player back to another area.
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That is what my post was trying to convey 
Curious, did it work well in that game?
This was a table top RPG. So very different requirements from a video game. The GM simply told the players they had arrived back at the town. Took them a while before they realised they had met a soft edge. Eventually they decided it was some sorcerer’s trick, which lead to an interesting side quest attempting to locate the sorcerer and remove the spell.
lol, okay. I was thinking more you can walk for (1 + x) meters in one direction through a streaming forest(or desert, plain sea, any easily repeatable environment) but only need to walk 1 m back. Maybe there is a sliding scale ratio to simultaneously limit the hamster wheel effect as well as returning the player back to the game. Raw forced teleportation probably has immersion issues unless logically existing within the world.(aka magic, being literally in a computer game etc)
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