Many people point out game size in mobile is a big deal. I disagree. I have multiple games on my phone such as flight simulators that are over two gigabytes and I still have room left on my phone. SimplePlanes is such a good game that I would happily sacrifice storage space for a fuller game. I want the islands that aren't available for mobile. I want a big ol game to download. Do you agree?
IT DOES @joeysellers
To clarify about Maywar, the desert island:
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Each of the large islands (Wright, Krakabloa, Snowstone) are the same 'size' as one another, squared, even if some of its area recedes beneath the ocean depths.
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Maywar is unique, in that it takes the same square space, but stitches FOUR of them together. The size of the game is not the issue, but the size of the world space itself, and the hardware limits of rendering such an expansive area.
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With aircraft zooming about at high speeds at high altitudes, you can see an entire island at once. It's quite a bit easier to render terrain if the game is designed to be played on the ground, with only your immediate surroundings visible, but when you're playing with a bird's eye view? Even in games that allow an overhead view of the landscape, you'll notice loss of detail in faraway objects and good use of a fog to obscure visibility. We did our best to work around these limitations to give a better flying experience, and this is also why the islands are as spaced out as they are, so you rarely see two islands at one time.
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Hope this helps clarify things.
@Shmexysmpilot can the devs use minecraft-style map loading? It saves RAM usage and is even used in free roam racing games.
It only loads the surrounding area and removes it from RAM and downloads other areas when you move to another place.
The devs should add a separate optional downloadable file for mobile users who have more memory space.
Newer phones even come with 32, 64 or even 128 GB of space.
Why sacrifice them?
@Thomasj041 yes. Exactly what i was thinking. In game downloads would solve all the problems. @AndrewGarrison
Or even better: the option to download islands so people that don't want to use up storage space can still play the game, and people that want the full game can choose to sacrifice extra space.
I really don't care about storage. I don't use a device with less than 64GB of storage (Apple Watch excepted). RAM is a different story. The devs chose to not add Maywar to mobile for a reason; that's one reason why the PC version retails for 2.5x the price of mobile.
My iPad would be full if that happened. ☹️🍔
@EternalDarkness oh haha, I guess magicians never reveal their secrets lol. Yeah, I tried to learn some basic code but mostly I just know the basics of how code works as opposed to actually understanding the languages
@Shmexysmpilot I did not. Even if he told me, I'm not going with programing stuff. They made an experiment, to see how it will turn out, and the result was, apparently, too good not to be published.
@EternalDarkness do you know what's so different about it compared to other islands? It's interesting that they would make one island in a different way than they made the others
Yeah. And storage size and (for example) map size like the sand island are two different things. You can easily store the data for maywar (the sand island) on your phone but you couldn't hope to run it all at once in-game. Even the latest iPads and such can't even run it. It doesn't just lag, but the game actually crashes trying to process the whole map at once
In conversation with one of the developers, I found out that the desert island is significantly different from other islands in terms of code, making it much harder for device to handle. In fact, he said it would take significantly more processing power than the entire map we have on our mobile devices.
Sure