Quote: "you could spread the islands far enough apart that you can just use one terrain for all the islands and just reposition there terrain when the islands were in range."
Well, I've thought of some tricks and have started implementing them. First, I've made a 9x9 "metagrid" of the world, that spans the entire world. Each of the 9x9 metagrids contains 10x10 terrain objects. And each of these 10x10 terrain objects is made up of a 64x64 grid. So, I've made it (or am in the process of making it) to where each metagrid is only one flat object until you try to edit it, and then it switches to 10x10 single objects, with only the specific terrain you try to edit switching to a 64x64 grid. So you end up only saving the actual terrain for the areas that actually have terrain, the rest is all just single flat plains.
Also, I created a way to make a low resolution version of each part of the 10x10 grid, turning them into a 16x16 estimation, which is actually hardly noticeable from a distance, and decreases the grid parts from 4096 to only 256.
Quote: "I think I'd advise letting the player go no longer than 30-45 seconds without giving them something new to do. I know it's completely unrealistic - and I can completely sympathise with you wanting to make the game feel more weighty by having stretches where the player is just sailing - but you are making something that people will want to play, and it would seem a bit wasteful to just give them minutes-long stretches of nothing. After all, forcing the player to sail for any length of time (be it 10 seconds or 10 minutes) causes a lull in the game and creates an effect; you have to ask yourself at what point that effect of calm begins to wane and give way to boredom and impatience. "
Yeah, I know what you mean. I've definitely got to find a balance between the two, but I think a lot of it's going to just require some testing.
Quote: "If you're not planning on having a Fast Travel system like in Oblivion and Fallout 3 - so, if the player has to sail whenever they want to go island-hopping - then I'd advise having little islands pop up every one or two minutes, with the odd pirate battle or shipwreck (or encounter with a whale?) in between, so that the player has roughly one exciting event for every 30-45 seconds of empty sailing. You could extend it for more than that, but I'd advise against it.
Also, what might work well is spacing the small islands in such a way that the player can always see a new island on the horizon. This will make them think "Ooh, I wonder what's on there?" and sail towards it. They can explore the island, get back in their ship - and then spot another island on the horizon and sail towards that. This really got to me in Fallout 3: there was always one more building in the distance to explore, and I found myself compelled to have just the next one, and the next one, and so on. This might not make sense on the high seas where islands are generally sparse, but maybe you could cluster islands into archepelagos and achieve a similar effect?"
Yeah, I'm not sure if I'll have a fast travel system, but I'm actually leaning towards not having one to encourage players to explore more. And there will almost definitely be several islands in your view at all times, so that shouldn't be a problem. And for now, I'm not worrying about the actual ocean, since the player won't be going that way, and if they do I'll probably do something like just stop them from moving or warn them to turn around to avoid a sea monster attack
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Quote: "As for how long it should take to sail across the whole map... maybe an hour? Maybe less? I'm not really sure. Maybe you could place your islands on the assumption that the world map will take, say, half an hour to travel across, and then see if everything feels at the right density; if it feels too dense you can double the map size and spread everything out, and if it feels too sparse you can make it smaller."
I've decreased the size from a 13x13 grid to a 9x9 grid, so that makes it about 40 minutes to sail across, about 55 if you go diagonally, so hopefully that will be right. Here's some screenshots to show the current scale of the world (and the metagrid I was talking about):
Here's the island I made in the video, with an added dock and ship, right now you can see the seam of the terrain object that makes up part of the 10x10 grid in this section.
And here you can see the size of one metagrid in reference to the island.
And here would be the entire size of the world.
