The Tourmaline Turnabout (Patreon)

and so it was at about 4:55am, after sketching out, sectioning off and structuring in a dozen map pieces out of a 150,000 tile working map,

that i realized what the fuck i was doing was just not going to work at all.

as much as i want tourmaline to be a wide open expanse to aimlessly explore and get lost in the sheer nothingness of, and as awesome of a map as that would be to make, it's just not possible because of everyone's favorite scourge upon this earth, 

lag.

there are two things that cause a map to lag:
- map connections (essentials tethers map pieces together for a flowing overworld, RSE style-- that means its loading multiple maps at once which plummets performance)
- and lots of events. weaker computers start to lag around ~175 events on a single map. 

unfortunately i don't have another way to actually move a player from one map to another except by using connections, or teleport events.

the desert is 300 tiles wide in itself, the bulk of which is intended to be wide open area. that means i would either need to do a connection (which i no longer use because it lags much more, hi route 2), or use events for every space.

that comes out to about 300 events just for one side. -- and then there'll be the other sides and everything that actually happens IN the map.

so it was that at 5:02am, defeated by mechanical limitations, i resigned to bed, determined to come up with a solution after i slept.

and so it was that at 5:08am, ignoring my friend's increasibly desperate pleas for me to please go the heck to sleep already, i proceeded to get much too wrapped up in how i can make this work

in a 300 by 500 area, there is basically no way i can cut it, i realized, that i wouldn't have to use all of my events on teleports. even a 40x40 area would need, in some cases, around 160 for all sides but if i did it that way then i'd need upwards of 50 maps. nope.

so what divisions can i make to maximize the area while minimizing the perimeter? i should've paid attention in 5th grade math but i was too busy writing illegible adventure stories in my journal.........

the more cuts i make, the more perimeter there will be, and therefore the more events will be needed. so i should make as few cuts as possible. the best answer was the obvious one-- leave it as a single giant map.

but that doesn't work either.

one of the reason i intended to do cuts was so that i could minimize event-count lag on that huge map. well clearly that was going to backfire. but the other reason was so that i could add some parts of the desert that would change between transitions-- like mirage oases. 

if i'm using one giant map, i can't do that.

...unless i used several giant maps that were mostly identical except for those differences. 

when the player enters the map it could select one to use for a while. it creates a lot more work for eventing but in the end the effect will mostly be the same. then all i have to do is keep the event count for the giant map under 175. it's a good thing the desert is supposed to be empty-- because it'll have to be. 

there are still a few cuts that i will be making, notably in places where the way  through narrows enough that i dont have to use 525,600 events, but even discounting those sections, tourmaline will be the largest map in the game-- and the area itself is quite a bit larger than all parts of azurine lake combined.

 i do seem to love making work for myself.  

oh well. go big or go home