Seamless Loading of Zones

[Tontow]

If you have played World of Warcraft or Morrowind: the elder scrolls 3, then you know what seamless loading is.

I think this is done by first loading your current zone (so you can start playing ASAP) and then loading adjacent zones in the background.

It could also give priority to whichever zone that you are closer too, thus loading it first.

Edit: This should use less ram than loading all the zones in the game which will eventually be imposable and impractical if the world gets too big.  I also think that it is better than the ?keep maps loaded? option.

[DaveG]

Been suggested before.  Not practical, at the moment, but obviously would be a fantastic thing to add in the future.

[BlackAcre]

A gig of RAM is practically standard nowadays.  Loading all the maps (right now, anyway) isn\'t that big a load.

[acraig]

Seamless loading is one of those \'holy grail\' type things.  The major issue with this is the fact that everything has to be thread safe ( i.e, you need to load stuff in the background and for that you need a loading thread ).  Making things thread safe is *very* difficult.  Anything to do with threads is difficult because of the processing is not really consistant.  Depends on how the threads share the CPU.

Believe me, I\'d love to have seemless loading. WoW is awesome in that way, even when you are on the taxi you don\'t notice any loading and hardly any popup.