Is Construct3 the right engine for a very large isometric world?

Hi there,

Can I ask for some honest advise about Construct 3? I see a lot of people using Unity so it makes me wonder if Construct 3 is right for building a sprite-based massive isometric world.

I want to lay out a game world that takes 9 real-world hours to walk across from top to bottom. The story of the in-game world has a significant relationship to walking and being on foot. It talks about walking up ( in to mountains ) and walking down as a means for primitive navigation. So to make a map that follows the story, the player needs to walk, a lot.

This means that the map layout needs to be sized so that walking for one day-cycle in game takes an hour in real life. Imagine pressing the up-arrow on your keyboard for 9 real hours to walk the full extend of the map.

Is that reasonable to do in Construct 3? I've read posts here about only loading things within view of the player. In general it seems possible. But when I hire someone to make this, will they have to make so many layouts in Construct that it will just be impossible to work with? Is the Construct editor not the right platform for laying out very large maps?

Or does anyone have an example of a construct-based game of a size like this? Is this a reasonable use for this game engine?

The main reasons to go with 3d over 2d in an isometric setting is the number of frames for characters, and objects that need to show multiple views, and a non-tiled setting where rounding can be an issue.(Ogre Battle vs Diablo as example differences). These things can be done in 2d with great effort, but 3d makes it trivial.

With the given information the 2d isometric setting could be implemented in C3 fairly easy.

Of course the key is knowing how to do it.

The only foreseeable issue might be garbage collection.

You reminded me of a game I played a long time ago, Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, you could walk for hours, but unfortunately there wasn't much to see :)

Well, no engine offers that functionality 'out of the box', so it would mostly be custom code, and in that case Construct should be as good as any other engine.

You probably wouldn't edit a map that large by hand or your grandchildren might still be trying to finish it. So you probably want to read about procedural generation to generate large areas of the map. Then you would break those up into smaller areas and edit those by hand to create towns etc. that need more of an artistic touch.

You have the right idea about in the game - only loading what is in the view (and usually a buffer area around the view). So you probably want to read about using 'chunks' for an open world game. Basically you take your world and cut it up into smaller squares - and you store that data on disk - and load/delete the objects from the smaller squares as your player moves around the world.

If you are only walking in one direction, like walking forward but with some shifting left/right like an endless runner, then it's much easier.

Thanks for the responses so far. There are so many MMO worlds that I thought perhaps there was a better engine that supported it out of the box.

I have read so far about procedural world building. That's definitely possible in this, just as has been said. Procedural between towns, hand-edited within town.

I have also read here about overlapping chunks to make the transition feel seamless.

Ok, if no-one knows of an engine out of the box that can handle very large worlds, then I might as well use C3.

Anyone interested in writing a scope to build phase 1 of the land for me?

clintbellanger.net/articles/isometric_math

Then check out a bunch of the included templates.

Specifically endless runners, and Advanced Random.

You will not be able to fill a screen with individual iso tiles let alone an endless map.

Then again not everything has to be an isometric projection.

You're going to need to fake some things with Tiled Backgrounds.