Game Length question.

[Deluxe]

I have a simple question. Is there a limit to how big a game can be? Such as level limits or entity caps?

[deWiTTERS]

Level limit is 200 I think. No limit on entities, except that performance might suffer when things get too big.

[Marby]

200 levels is a pretty small limit in comparison to the 999 “levels” (called maps there) the RPG Makers have. RPG Maker 2003 has even a limit of 9999 maps. I guess there is almost no chance to use them all (except one would waste maps, but this does not make any sense). Perhaps rpg playground should have at least 999 levels like the makers. Or is there a reason for the 200 level limit?
I agree that most of the game designers here won’t use so many levels for just one game. But some of the members here… maybe. I wouldn’t exclude this. And if someone is that creative RPG Playground should not stop them.

[Macmor]

I needed to split my game into chapters because I was already at 136 after the first part. I’m all for increasing the level cap, I would use all 999 of them, but saves are going to be necessary if it does increase. Well, they already are imo.

[Marby]

For real big games, you’ll need them for sure. Not sure if I will ever produce such a big game myself, but yes I agree. This should be possible.

What I do now in order to save levels is to place many smaller maps on only one maximum sized level. That way I created e. g. about 20 small indoor maps on one level for my first game, which massively saves levels. However, we need to be careful with this. If a map is placed to close to another map the player will notice this. And if a map is placed to close to the level’s borders the scrolling will be strange. Also to shift such small maps around to reorganize the level is very cumbersome now, since we have no proper tool for this yet. Nevertheless, more levels would allow us to make our games here as big as this is already possible with the RPG Makers. If RPG Playground would allow even the same limit as RPG Maker 2003 (=9999 levels) this also could be one more reason why people should choose RPG Playground instead the newer Makers.

[Deluxe]

Increasing levels wouldn’t do too much good in the long run. Some big games that are close to that 200 level cap have some performance issues, because of how big and complex they are, performance would need to be improved first, otherwise it would be useless.

[Marby]

Indeed, that’s a point. Perhaps this can be solved by not loading the whole game from the beginning. If we could trigger the engine directly to load additional levels and other data (like preloaded bgm e.g.) as well as to unload them from memory our games could be more flexible. This also could reduce the use of ressources and increase the performance. However, organizing memory rather is an advanced topic and could lead to runtime errors if not implemented correctly by the game creators.

[deWiTTERS]

The current level limit is indeed for performance reasons. And it’s very much related to save and load.

Because I can’t save and load, I need to keep all levels in memory (at least the ones you visited anyway). Or every level would restart when you revisit it (retro games might have this for that same reason). Once I can save and load, I can push some levels out of the working memory. Then I can more or less support an unlimited amount of levels.

I’ll add this to the roadmap, so we don’t forget about it: https://trello.com/c/xu7mJhcL

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