ANet are without a doubt skilled coders & designers, so it puzzle me that they kinda choose to have loading screen between zones: why not a seamless world like WoW, Terra etc. ?
Is it because of some kind of limitations with the dynamic events or something ?
This is misconception
Neither WOW (or TERA) has seamles world.
For example when you going from zone to zone - lets take quite obvious Dun Morogh to Loch Modan
You are passing trough a lenghty tunnel.
Now what happens while you pass trough it, is that the game actually loads next zone.
It cleverly hides the loading screen, by putting you in not-interactive area ( tunnel in this case).
Don't think that theory is valid seeing as you can fly from one end of a continent to the other without any visual distortions..
Speculation; as the user comes closer to the end of a zone, they use dynamic streaming to impliment the next zone behind the far cliping plane.
Exactly
You are flying over non interactive zones. As i mentioned above.
Wether its tunel, or fat area of land that player on foot can not pass. Its the same.
Zone that exists only on your hard drive - there for no server information is needed.
LOL at the hypocrites...any other MMO that has loading screens would be torn apart...GW2 has loading screens, it's rationalized away as a good thing.
hilarious.
Now that you mentioned i wonder where were all these people when games like AOC, Rift, SWTOR etc were released. Oh wait..too busy ripping those games apart.
There's very likely a server performance advantage to the current setup, and GW2's combat is much more action based so needs that low latency to work well.
The OP is correct, if they wanted to, they could have done. A fair few F2P games are 'seamless' as well, so it's not hard. But there's obviously an advantage to the zonal setup.
It is simply too costly to create one HUGE full 3D world with 25 zones background loading.
Because in a seamless open world EACH zone can't have an "end" ... be that inivisible or with a painted 2D mountain.
I read somewhere that the development cost to produce a real 3D continent without individual bordered zones (fake or not) costs around 3 times more than just creating zoned maps with fixed (invisible) borders.
The sad part is that we are gonna loose a world feature due to lazyness and cost effectiveness.
If this gets standard procedure, you might as well kiss goodbey to worlds designed like Azeroth.
Like I said: all hope is now on Jeff Kaplans shoulders, because if Blizzard will take the same route with Titan: it is game over: you might as well play COD maps.... with BETTER graphics.
If it costs so much, why do perfect world, Rappelz and silkroad have them?
It isn't a cost issue. It'll be a performance one. It's the same reason why WoW has slowly becaome less and less seamless over time. It's but a mere illusion of a seamless world now, with badly disguised loading times all over the shop.
Dude, since when did you stop playing WOW .. in 2004 ?
Seriously, you can fly all over the Eastern Kingdoms continent, that's 40 (!) zones, without ever seeing a loading screen.
That's starting in Booty Bay with your personal flying mount ,- flying or riding ANYWHERE - and then go north to the top. Landing anywhere too - on any mountain - no loading screens. You can still take that tunnel or you just can fly all over it ...
Seriously. Keep up to date ...
The same goes far all other contintents you cross (Northrend, Outland, Kalimdor).
The technique you described was 2004/2005. In 2007 came Outland and the rest of Azeroth was adapted with a real seamless 3D world - without fake 2D borders per zone - in 2010.
The fact GW2 comes without a seamless open world in a so called NEW wave mmorpg is sad, very very sad.
It would mean that if you walked in Azeroth you would see 5 portals and 5 loading graphics screens from say Elwyn Forest to Swamp of Sorrows... with EACH intervening zone bordered by FAKE 2D borders or invisible walls.
There is NO EXCUSE for this and it is pathetic in world design.
This is a huge step backward in present day technology.
Why is it sad? Because EVERYONE will play GW2 and it will be a huge success, but we lost (again) something very valuable in the process.
It sets us 7 years back in time. Might as well play COD maps. I am going to write to Jeff Kaplan now, if Titan will use the same techniques iIll be the biggest Blizzard hater in man kind....
You talk about what we're losing as a result of stepping back from this seamless world. The real question is what do we gain in return.
You're right that WoW has had seamless zones since forever.
But let's flip it around. Guild Wars has had no downtime on their servers since forever. Their servers don't go down for weekly maintenance. If there's a new build, you get a message about it, you log out, you log in. Boom, done. Guild Wars also doesn't wait to patch all at once. You take a few seconds at a loading screen each time you need, but otherwise you can just log in any time, any day, no problem.
Not to be all "blind faith in ArenaNet fanboy" but if WoW has been doing preloading forever, and other games like Rift can also do it, don't you think ArenaNet could also make that happen with a brand new game and a brand new engine, especially given all the other things they're doing with servers (WvW, overflow)?
There must be some reason about some feature of this game that they're not doing it. Maybe it's because of having to keep track of the different states of DEs. Maybe it's so they can continue with their incremental loading process of GW1. Maybe it's so they can load 4x as many environmental assets per zone and not have to repeat them. I don't know enough to say for sure how much each of these factors (or others I'm forgetting) play into it.
It's cool to hop on a flying mount and take in a faraway vista, but flying mounts are also a detriment to a game. They take away the sense of scale and danger from each individual zone while letting you bypass content.
GW2 may not be seamless, but I don't think it's a great sacrifice and I don't think people are going to miss it. The zones are going to be huge with plenty of things to explore and do in them. And teleporting means getting to your friends quickly even if they're halfway across the world, and that's going to overcome a lot of negativity about loading screens.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it."-Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
LOL at the hypocrites...any other MMO that has loading screens would be torn apart...GW2 has loading screens, it's rationalized away as a good thing.
hilarious.
This just shows the extreme hype of it all.
But it is a reality: GW2 will put a big scar on seamless world play.
And there is even a big chance it will become standard. All my hope is on Kaplan now. It can't be they'll do the same with Titan.
It just can't be.
You'll probably have to accept it as gone for now There's going to have been a reason why every major MMO isn't a seamless world any more. And don't pin it on 'laziness' because that's the laziest answer you can give. It shows you simply haven't looked into the issues. When this many games have abandoned seamless worlds when cheap, 10 a penny F2P MMO's still have them, you know it's not a skill, effort or money issue.
There's an underlying reason. If i had to pin it on something it would be performance and the fact that graphics have advanced. The main difference between WoW & those crap looking F2P games and games like GW2/Rift/ToR ect. is that the latter all look vastly better. Note that TERA & FFXIV are seamless but also lack model variation in the maps. It's an important thing to note.
LOL at the hypocrites...any other MMO that has loading screens would be torn apart...GW2 has loading screens, it's rationalized away as a good thing.
hilarious.
This just shows the extreme hype of it all.
But it is a reality: GW2 will put a big scar on seamless world play.
And there is even a big chance it will become standard. All my hope is on Kaplan now. It can't be they'll do the same with Titan.
It just can't be.
Jeezus! What are you guys on? You see loading screens because of teleports. And that's it. The underlying engine is pretty much the same as WoW, the same guy did net engines for both games. The major difference is that capital cities are loaded separately, like if you were moving between continents and that's because the capitals are HUGE and crawling with content. What were you talking about again?
Of course it has loading screens. Jeez, how can you have teleporting mechanic in a mmo without a loading screen? Just because it has loading screens doesn't mean it's "zoned". And besides, if you hate loading screens then just don't teleport around. There problem solved.
And mentioning AoC in the same breath with GW2 is like the biggest case of hyperbole on this site I've seen in the past couple of hours lol.
This does not make sense in my world. I can see, that it is a problem having too many different assets loaded at the same time (=filling up memory), but with unloading terrain behind you, only a limited amount of terrain is in memory at any one time. I cannot see how that will max out a computer with the amounts of memory they have nowadays, both on the machine and on the graphicscard.
As you can see from the second paragraph you quoted, it does not seem like it was really a limit of the engine (otherwise they would have had to re-code the terrain-part of the engine), but more an artist limit.
Is it because of some kind of limitations with the dynamic events or something ?
I suspect that might be the most obvious reason why, yes. Perhaps the engine couldn't handle so many events going on simultaneously in ONE zone? Or perhaps it was a decision made to prevent DEs overlapping with one other or something? I don't know, but I really don't mind it. But then again, I didn't care about how AoC did it and that kinda puts me in minority from the get-go.
Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.
ANet are without a doubt skilled coders & designers, so it puzzle me that they kinda choose to have loading screen between zones: why not a seamless world like WoW, Terra etc. ?
Is it because of some kind of limitations with the dynamic events or something ?
This is misconception
Neither WOW (or TERA) has seamles world.
For example when you going from zone to zone - lets take quite obvious Dun Morogh to Loch Modan
You are passing trough a lenghty tunnel.
Now what happens while you pass trough it, is that the game actually loads next zone.
It cleverly hides the loading screen, by putting you in not-interactive area ( tunnel in this case).
Don't think that theory is valid seeing as you can fly from one end of a continent to the other without any visual distortions..
Speculation; as the user comes closer to the end of a zone, they use dynamic streaming to impliment the next zone behind the far cliping plane.
Exactly
You are flying over non interactive zones. As i mentioned above.
Wether its tunel, or fat area of land that player on foot can not pass. Its the same.
Zone that exists only on your hard drive - there for no server information is needed.
What's wrong with this guy ??? Can't he read ?
No dude, you can take your horse to cross zones. All 40 of them in Eastern Kingdoms (and other continents) apart from flying.
Look.
The WoW areas are loading in background. All they need is strip of land - lets call it a buffer zone.
You can walk trough it, fly over it, swim over it...whatever
But while you are in them server is loading new zone and unloading old zone.
All they have to be is long enough for loading/unloading to happen.
And since WOW is very light game (comparing to let say GW)
This loading takes very little time. This is why the buffer zones became smaller and smaller as the technology advanced ( Vanilla >> TBC >> )
Why they didnt do this for GW2 ?
Beats me... maybe the ammount of memory GW2 grabs is far larger than WOW ?
Jeezus! What are you guys on? You see loading screens because of teleports. And that's it. The underlying engine is pretty much the same as WoW, the same guy did net engines for both games. The major difference is that capital cities are loaded separately, like if you were moving between continents and that's because the capitals are HUGE and crawling with content. What were you talking about again?
Of course it has loading screens. Jeez, how can you have teleporting mechanic in a mmo without a loading screen? Just because it has loading screens doesn't mean it's "zoned". And besides, if you hate loading screens then just don't teleport around. There problem solved.
What the hell are you guys on, saying that WoW is not seamless?? How the hell will you otherwise define seamless, than that there is no loading screens?
OF COURSE WoW loads in the background. It cannot be done in any other way, as a machine only has so much memory.
Loading in the background, avoiding load-screens is the very definition of seamless, so gimme a break.
About the guy claiming that it is not seamless, because you go through a tunnel: It is still seamless. There is no "seam" (load screen). Also, that is only one example. Many zones in WoW you move between without any limits like that (Elwynn Forest to Duskwood for instance, where you swim over a river whereever you want).
The only non-seamlessness in WoW is between continents and when entering instances.
Seams refer to zone borders, which are still there in WoW whether you notice them or not.
Originally posted by smh_alot
WHat I'm curious about is, if you walk from one end of Tyria to the next, will you encounter zoning or not? I know that you definitely zone when entering and exiting a city, but I don't know how it is when traveling outside of cities. So far I saw portals and loading screens, but I don't know if that was purely for the demo or if that's the actual situation.
As far as I remember there are no loading screens between zones but there are loading screens between regions (a group of zones such as Kryta) but don't quote me on that.
There will ALWAYS be borders. How else are you going to decide when to load what? Terrain is in effect a bunch of meshes organized so you cannot see the seams between them. Whatever the size of these meshes, they still need to define a fixed area. These areas are often called Patches or Tiles. As you approach unloaded Patches/Tiles, they will begin loading in the background.
I agree, that WoW is more zoned than necessary, but it is still seamless. You could easily have a PvP fight on zone borders (which we had several times on the bridge between Badlands and Duskwood), making the world very much seamless.
WoW chose to make zones for another reason: Variety of landscape. And by defining a zone, they could adjust the lightning (for instance, the lighting turns bluish and dark when you cross over to Duskwood).
An MMO is seamless if you don't notice loading screen while you travel from continent to continent.
The methods they use to achieve this are all irrelevant and only the result is important. If they achieve no loading screens while you travel around, the word is seamless.
I don't know if GW2 is a seamless world. What I do know is that I have no such expectation, especially from a B2P game, considering there are P2P games out there that are not seamless and people still subscribe to them.
I think the shitstorm of unrealistic expectations is starting to hit GW2 as we speak.
The problem is that ppl don't even understand what seamless is.
I'm sure you can run for 50 minutes in tyria without seeing a loadscreen, but if u teleport somewhere u gonna get a short loading screen
This!
You can not have a system load the whole zone you move out it gets flushed out of video memory. You teleport it needs to load back in otherwise you would run out of memory before you even load up.
And everyone using Wow for example well guess what if you teleport you have to load... just like in GW2.
Edit - And I have watch loads of Videos on GW2 the 45 min one is great he runs all over the place with no loading screen.
This does not make sense in my world. I can see, that it is a problem having too many different assets loaded at the same time (=filling up memory), but with unloading terrain behind you, only a limited amount of terrain is in memory at any one time. I cannot see how that will max out a computer with the amounts of memory they have nowadays, both on the machine and on the graphicscard.
As you can see from the second paragraph you quoted, it does not seem like it was really a limit of the engine (otherwise they would have had to re-code the terrain-part of the engine), but more an artist limit.
I don't know the technical details but the consensus in the FF XIV case has been that the performance limitations that come with seamlessness greatly limited the artistic freedom for the design of areas. They could of course be lying, but I just find it very hard to believe given that they have been so open and communicative about their development plans for many months.
Quite honestly the only truly seamless game that i know of is Vanguard.
I know i know i know... you think WHAT ? You are totally full of CARP ! (spelling intended).
But even with clever transitions that WoW imploys or any other game that does this you still have to load into the dungeon instances.
With Vanguard you walk into the dungeons and walk out of them, there is no transition, sure its more than likely the same sort of smoke and mirrors background loading that WoW and other games utilize, but to the player its seamless. This likely was why the game was so terribly optimized on release because of the massive amounts of constant loading of structures and underground structures.
I would guess it's because of the amount of detail in each zone, which would cause too much lag if streamed, who knows.
But does it really matter? Nope.
I too like a seamlesss world, but think of it, when did you last time actually used this feature? I played LOTRO for years, that game has a seamless world, but how many times did I actually run from one end to another? Just once, when recording the Journey vid, took me 1.5 hours or so. What do end game characters do 99% of the time? They port using fast travel, they jump into instances from the selection screen, etc. That means they see loading screens all the time even though the world is seamless. The same goes for all other games.
The trick is to make the zones really huge, but the world does not need to be seamless. Considering you will use the waypoint port system in GW almost 95% of the time, you will see a loading screen every few minutes anyway, whether the world is semless, or not.
This does not make sense in my world. I can see, that it is a problem having too many different assets loaded at the same time (=filling up memory), but with unloading terrain behind you, only a limited amount of terrain is in memory at any one time. I cannot see how that will max out a computer with the amounts of memory they have nowadays, both on the machine and on the graphicscard.
As you can see from the second paragraph you quoted, it does not seem like it was really a limit of the engine (otherwise they would have had to re-code the terrain-part of the engine), but more an artist limit.
I don't know the technical details but the consensus in the FF XIV case has been that the performance limitations that come with seamlessness greatly limited the artistic freedom for the design of areas. They could of course be lying, but I just find it very hard to believe given that they have been so open and communicative about their development plans for many months.
Im developing Terrain as we speak. I have a 4x4 km world (r/l 4x4 km), which takes 40 minutes to walk across, more than it takes to walk from the north end of Eastern Kingdoms continent to the south.
I could easily scale this up to an amount only limited by my harddisk, and it would not put an additional load on my system.
I can still see, that with an enormous variety of other assets (trees, grass, bushes, houses, wildlife etc.), that you could run into problems, but maybe the loaded assets are too big then. But if that is the case, then you will also run into problems in a non-seamless world.
Btw, that is another beauty of WoW: Its low-usage assets (see how simple the trees are, for instance).
Seamlessness poses alot of other challenges on programmers. They need to do load-balancing. They need to dynamically load/unload assets (multithreading, ugly if you are not experienced with it), they need to load various versions of the same asset (a low-poly version of a tree for far-away view, and then swap in a high-poly version when getting closer).
With a non-seamless system it is much easier, because you are 100% in control of what is loaded into memory (=everything).
If you take a look at Skyrim, then you will see, that it has a seamless world, much like an MMO would need, and you can see how the technology works in detail with some console commands (you can see it wireframed, and you can fly). You can see how it simplifies far-away terrain and how it swaps more advanced graphics in as you get closer etc. (the popping is ugly, but hey, I guess everything can't be perfect - it would be possible to make softer transitions).
This is much the same technology, that an MMO would need, but it is advanced and takes quite an effort to develop.
The WoW areas are loading in background. All they need is strip of land - lets call it a buffer zone.
You can walk trough it, fly over it, swim over it...whatever
But while you are in them server is loading new zone and unloading old zone.
All they have to be is long enough for loading/unloading to happen.
And since WOW is very light game (comparing to let say GW)
This loading takes very little time. This is why the buffer zones became smaller and smaller as the technology advanced ( Vanilla >> TBC >> )
Why they didnt do this for GW2 ?
Beats me... maybe the ammount of memory GW2 grabs is far larger than WOW ?
There are no buffer zones in WoW. If you climb on some mountain or fligh high enough you can actually see other zones around you. In fact there are console commands that allow you to extend your maximal view distance in which case you can see half of the continent. So please stop posting this BS. Seriously.
Of course the engine is constantly loading and unloading content as you move, but this is not limited to one zone. WoW truly has seamless world.
GW2 has loading screens because the game is build on the old GW1 engine. Meaning every zone is in fact instanced. The only difference is that now the zones can handle lot more than five players. But even in GW2 there are zone caps. Once the zone is full the server will create new instance of the zone.
Seamless is really a perception. WoW isn't seamless, but hides the seams briliantly. The size of the continents certainly hide the seams, for sure. Time will tell how apparent these are in GW2.
I can't believe we fell for this thread. The op made a completely baseless assumption and then proceeded to ask a question based on it...
"When did you stop beating your wife?"
Loooll
Oldest troll trick in the book lol.
I don't know if it is baseless or not but so far from press releases yes there are loading screens. But like i said in another topic an average player sees laoding screens he thinks it is not seamless doesn't mean OP was trying to troll. I find it really ironic that you are calling him a troll after your own posting history on SWTOR forums.
GW2 has loading screens because the game is build on the old GW1 engine. Meaning every zone is in fact instanced. The only difference is that now the zones can handle lot more than five players. But even in GW2 there are zone caps. Once the zone is full the server will create new instance of the zone.
Jeez, what are you talking about again? GW2 is NOT based on GW1 engine man. GW1 engine was basucally 2D coop, GW2's engine is full 3D mmo.
They probably ported some gfx routines and stuff from GW1 but netcode and the engine core is completely new, jeezus.
Comments
Exactly
You are flying over non interactive zones. As i mentioned above.
Wether its tunel, or fat area of land that player on foot can not pass. Its the same.
Zone that exists only on your hard drive - there for no server information is needed.
LOL at the hypocrites...any other MMO that has loading screens would be torn apart...GW2 has loading screens, it's rationalized away as a good thing.
hilarious.
Now that you mentioned i wonder where were all these people when games like AOC, Rift, SWTOR etc were released. Oh wait..too busy ripping those games apart.
If it costs so much, why do perfect world, Rappelz and silkroad have them?
It isn't a cost issue. It'll be a performance one. It's the same reason why WoW has slowly becaome less and less seamless over time. It's but a mere illusion of a seamless world now, with badly disguised loading times all over the shop.
You talk about what we're losing as a result of stepping back from this seamless world. The real question is what do we gain in return.
You're right that WoW has had seamless zones since forever.
But let's flip it around. Guild Wars has had no downtime on their servers since forever. Their servers don't go down for weekly maintenance. If there's a new build, you get a message about it, you log out, you log in. Boom, done. Guild Wars also doesn't wait to patch all at once. You take a few seconds at a loading screen each time you need, but otherwise you can just log in any time, any day, no problem.
Not to be all "blind faith in ArenaNet fanboy" but if WoW has been doing preloading forever, and other games like Rift can also do it, don't you think ArenaNet could also make that happen with a brand new game and a brand new engine, especially given all the other things they're doing with servers (WvW, overflow)?
There must be some reason about some feature of this game that they're not doing it. Maybe it's because of having to keep track of the different states of DEs. Maybe it's so they can continue with their incremental loading process of GW1. Maybe it's so they can load 4x as many environmental assets per zone and not have to repeat them. I don't know enough to say for sure how much each of these factors (or others I'm forgetting) play into it.
It's cool to hop on a flying mount and take in a faraway vista, but flying mounts are also a detriment to a game. They take away the sense of scale and danger from each individual zone while letting you bypass content.
GW2 may not be seamless, but I don't think it's a great sacrifice and I don't think people are going to miss it. The zones are going to be huge with plenty of things to explore and do in them. And teleporting means getting to your friends quickly even if they're halfway across the world, and that's going to overcome a lot of negativity about loading screens.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." -Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
You'll probably have to accept it as gone for now
There's going to have been a reason why every major MMO isn't a seamless world any more. And don't pin it on 'laziness' because that's the laziest answer you can give. It shows you simply haven't looked into the issues. When this many games have abandoned seamless worlds when cheap, 10 a penny F2P MMO's still have them, you know it's not a skill, effort or money issue.
There's an underlying reason. If i had to pin it on something it would be performance and the fact that graphics have advanced. The main difference between WoW & those crap looking F2P games and games like GW2/Rift/ToR ect. is that the latter all look vastly better. Note that TERA & FFXIV are seamless but also lack model variation in the maps. It's an important thing to note.
Jeezus! What are you guys on? You see loading screens because of teleports. And that's it. The underlying engine is pretty much the same as WoW, the same guy did net engines for both games. The major difference is that capital cities are loaded separately, like if you were moving between continents and that's because the capitals are HUGE and crawling with content. What were you talking about again?
Of course it has loading screens. Jeez, how can you have teleporting mechanic in a mmo without a loading screen? Just because it has loading screens doesn't mean it's "zoned". And besides, if you hate loading screens then just don't teleport around. There problem solved.
And mentioning AoC in the same breath with GW2 is like the biggest case of hyperbole on this site I've seen in the past couple of hours lol.
This does not make sense in my world. I can see, that it is a problem having too many different assets loaded at the same time (=filling up memory), but with unloading terrain behind you, only a limited amount of terrain is in memory at any one time. I cannot see how that will max out a computer with the amounts of memory they have nowadays, both on the machine and on the graphicscard.
As you can see from the second paragraph you quoted, it does not seem like it was really a limit of the engine (otherwise they would have had to re-code the terrain-part of the engine), but more an artist limit.
Look.
The WoW areas are loading in background. All they need is strip of land - lets call it a buffer zone.
You can walk trough it, fly over it, swim over it...whatever
But while you are in them server is loading new zone and unloading old zone.
All they have to be is long enough for loading/unloading to happen.
And since WOW is very light game (comparing to let say GW)
This loading takes very little time. This is why the buffer zones became smaller and smaller as the technology advanced ( Vanilla >> TBC >> )
Why they didnt do this for GW2 ?
Beats me... maybe the ammount of memory GW2 grabs is far larger than WOW ?
And this
+1 mate
There will ALWAYS be borders. How else are you going to decide when to load what? Terrain is in effect a bunch of meshes organized so you cannot see the seams between them. Whatever the size of these meshes, they still need to define a fixed area. These areas are often called Patches or Tiles. As you approach unloaded Patches/Tiles, they will begin loading in the background.
I agree, that WoW is more zoned than necessary, but it is still seamless. You could easily have a PvP fight on zone borders (which we had several times on the bridge between Badlands and Duskwood), making the world very much seamless.
WoW chose to make zones for another reason: Variety of landscape. And by defining a zone, they could adjust the lightning (for instance, the lighting turns bluish and dark when you cross over to Duskwood).
Zones do not equal seams.
An MMO is seamless if you don't notice loading screen while you travel from continent to continent.
The methods they use to achieve this are all irrelevant and only the result is important. If they achieve no loading screens while you travel around, the word is seamless.
I don't know if GW2 is a seamless world. What I do know is that I have no such expectation, especially from a B2P game, considering there are P2P games out there that are not seamless and people still subscribe to them.
I think the shitstorm of unrealistic expectations is starting to hit GW2 as we speak.
This!
You can not have a system load the whole zone you move out it gets flushed out of video memory. You teleport it needs to load back in otherwise you would run out of memory before you even load up.
And everyone using Wow for example well guess what if you teleport you have to load... just like in GW2.
Edit - And I have watch loads of Videos on GW2 the 45 min one is great he runs all over the place with no loading screen.
I don't know the technical details but the consensus in the FF XIV case has been that the performance limitations that come with seamlessness greatly limited the artistic freedom for the design of areas. They could of course be lying, but I just find it very hard to believe given that they have been so open and communicative about their development plans for many months.
Quite honestly the only truly seamless game that i know of is Vanguard.
I know i know i know... you think WHAT ? You are totally full of CARP ! (spelling intended).
But even with clever transitions that WoW imploys or any other game that does this you still have to load into the dungeon instances.
With Vanguard you walk into the dungeons and walk out of them, there is no transition, sure its more than likely the same sort of smoke and mirrors background loading that WoW and other games utilize, but to the player its seamless. This likely was why the game was so terribly optimized on release because of the massive amounts of constant loading of structures and underground structures.
The trolls are grasping at straws now.
Lolipops !
I would guess it's because of the amount of detail in each zone, which would cause too much lag if streamed, who knows.
But does it really matter? Nope.
I too like a seamlesss world, but think of it, when did you last time actually used this feature? I played LOTRO for years, that game has a seamless world, but how many times did I actually run from one end to another? Just once, when recording the Journey vid, took me 1.5 hours or so. What do end game characters do 99% of the time? They port using fast travel, they jump into instances from the selection screen, etc. That means they see loading screens all the time even though the world is seamless. The same goes for all other games.
The trick is to make the zones really huge, but the world does not need to be seamless. Considering you will use the waypoint port system in GW almost 95% of the time, you will see a loading screen every few minutes anyway, whether the world is semless, or not.
My Guild Wars 2 First Beta Weekend "reviewette" : http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/post/4944570/thread/349125#4944570
Im developing Terrain as we speak. I have a 4x4 km world (r/l 4x4 km), which takes 40 minutes to walk across, more than it takes to walk from the north end of Eastern Kingdoms continent to the south.
I could easily scale this up to an amount only limited by my harddisk, and it would not put an additional load on my system.
I can still see, that with an enormous variety of other assets (trees, grass, bushes, houses, wildlife etc.), that you could run into problems, but maybe the loaded assets are too big then. But if that is the case, then you will also run into problems in a non-seamless world.
Btw, that is another beauty of WoW: Its low-usage assets (see how simple the trees are, for instance).
Seamlessness poses alot of other challenges on programmers. They need to do load-balancing. They need to dynamically load/unload assets (multithreading, ugly if you are not experienced with it), they need to load various versions of the same asset (a low-poly version of a tree for far-away view, and then swap in a high-poly version when getting closer).
With a non-seamless system it is much easier, because you are 100% in control of what is loaded into memory (=everything).
If you take a look at Skyrim, then you will see, that it has a seamless world, much like an MMO would need, and you can see how the technology works in detail with some console commands (you can see it wireframed, and you can fly). You can see how it simplifies far-away terrain and how it swaps more advanced graphics in as you get closer etc. (the popping is ugly, but hey, I guess everything can't be perfect - it would be possible to make softer transitions).
This is much the same technology, that an MMO would need, but it is advanced and takes quite an effort to develop.
There are no buffer zones in WoW. If you climb on some mountain or fligh high enough you can actually see other zones around you. In fact there are console commands that allow you to extend your maximal view distance in which case you can see half of the continent. So please stop posting this BS. Seriously.
Of course the engine is constantly loading and unloading content as you move, but this is not limited to one zone. WoW truly has seamless world.
GW2 has loading screens because the game is build on the old GW1 engine. Meaning every zone is in fact instanced. The only difference is that now the zones can handle lot more than five players. But even in GW2 there are zone caps. Once the zone is full the server will create new instance of the zone.
I can't believe we fell for this thread. The op made a completely baseless assumption and then proceeded to ask a question based on it...
"When did you stop beating your wife?"
Loooll
Oldest troll trick in the book lol.
Wow has seamless worlds? So when I took that boat from one Island to the next, that was just my drinking problem kicking in?
Seamless is really a perception. WoW isn't seamless, but hides the seams briliantly. The size of the continents certainly hide the seams, for sure. Time will tell how apparent these are in GW2.
I don't know if it is baseless or not but so far from press releases yes there are loading screens. But like i said in another topic an average player sees laoding screens he thinks it is not seamless doesn't mean OP was trying to troll. I find it really ironic that you are calling him a troll after your own posting history on SWTOR forums.
Hypocricy at its best.
Jeez, what are you talking about again? GW2 is NOT based on GW1 engine man. GW1 engine was basucally 2D coop, GW2's engine is full 3D mmo.
They probably ported some gfx routines and stuff from GW1 but netcode and the engine core is completely new, jeezus.
Again, "When did you stop beating your wife?"