Walking Felucca

Last time we drew the whole world of Felucca as one map. Today that map became the ground under your feet. Log in and you appear in the square of a town of one of the two realms; walk out of the gate and you are in the countryside the atlas planned.

The same map, tile for tile

The picture in the atlas and the game map are made by the same rules, so what you see in the atlas is what you walk: rivers that you cross at fords and causeways, lakes, the dark forests of the south, snowfields in the north, the open meadows of the March. Mountains are rock, as in Ultima Online, and roads climb through them as passes.

Forests are planted the way forests grow: in stands with clearings between them, saplings at the edges, ferns, bushes and fallen logs underneath. Trees are life-size, ten to seventeen metres tall, so a forest is planted sparsely enough that you can still see the ground and always find a way through. Bandit camps stand where the atlas put them.

A static world, changed by players

The whole map is baked once into a few files, like the map and statics files of Ultima Online. Nothing is generated while you play. What players change, a wall broken by a powder keg or a Wall of Stone, is kept by the server and sent to everyone as a change on top of the map.

Felucca is big: 16,384 tiles across, more than an hour's run. The server can't keep all of it running at once, so it only runs the parts of the world near players and starts the next part before you reach it.

What is not there yet

Towns are still empty: you see the square, the lanes and the plots where the houses will stand. Building them is the next step, with bridges, forts and dungeon entrances after that. The map itself still changes with each new bake until we settle the final world.