Biggest single player game map

[That Greek Guy]

prince of persia: warrior within
there is never a loading screen. EVER
The entire castel with : the main halls , the towers, the catacombs, the library, the caves, the seashore and everything else is one big continues map. You can go anywhere and the game will never stop to load

 

[Casimir_Effect]

Sins of a Solar Empire has maps spanning several solar systems. Unless something like X3 has is bigger, I think that wins.

I just finished a 16 hour game on SINS: Entrenchment. 6 stars, 194 planets. All the AI set to insane. Shit was epic

Jesus, I only have the original game but even then would spend two days playing a medium map against the AI. And that was two days barely moving from my seat. How the hell do you manage 194 planets? Your fleets must have been massive. That game is the most dangerous I've played recently when it comes to addiction.

prince of persia: warrior within
there is never a loading screen. EVER
The entire castel with : the main halls , the towers, the catacombs, the library, the caves, the seashore and everything else is one big continues map. You can go anywhere and the game will never stop to load

Can you remember if Sands of Time had any? I know WW was like that but can't remember if Sands had loading screens. And WW may as well have had them seeing as I died enough times. Goddamn exploding dogs, ninja prostitutes and the fucking Dahaka.
Dungeon Siege was also entirely seamless all the way through. Whether you were running around a forest, climbing a tower or hitting up the catacombs, there was never a load screen. And the game was massive. For its time that engine was ridiculously impressive.

 

[Vykrel]

Fuel's world is 5,560 sq. Miles. Or 14,400 sq kilometers. It is in the guiness book of world records as largest console game world. Its not randomly generated either. Too bad the game is mediocre.

took the words right outta my mouth.

 

[Jabberwock xeno]

All of you people forgot spore.

 

[spitefulsixth]

grand pulse, final fantasy xiii.
you know what i'm talking about

 

[moose_man]

I'm pretty sure it's Just Cause! 2.

 

[Glass Joe]

Mainstream, it's FUEL. Not that you've ever heard of FUEL, where the map is the size of Connecticut and you can actually explore it.

 

[SovietX]

FUEL. You know, that game noone bought. It had a giant gameworld, it was incredible.

 

[thingymuwatsit]

Well, if MMOs were included, Infinity: Quest for Earth would take top prize no problem, with Eve Online in second.

Practically speaking, the size of Minecraft is limited by the amount of hard disk space you have; with a kilometer taking about a megabyte (estimate) that 8-times-the-size-of-earth map would be approximately 4 petabytes in size. This ain't exactly within the reach of the average consumer's hard disc storage. Practically speaking, a couple gigabytes - a few thousand square kilometers - is a more practical limit, and nearly every game will top out at less than fifty.

Space games tend to blow the lid off the "possible maximum size" argument - it's not an issue at all to generate new star systems, and I once made a simulator that generated literally hundreds of galaxies, each with hundreds of millions of stars, each with up to a dozen planets... but that's not really usable area. I think Dwarf Fortress actually makes the largest useful maps.... but that's just my opinion.

actually, Minecraft maps are randomly generated: as you walk east new scenery is created, whilst the west is deleted and replaced when you go back by something else.

 

[philjo]

"Biggest"
In file size? Or in square metres? Or cubic metres?
Minecraft can create an environment 8 times the surface area of earth, but it doesn't mean anything until you start talking numbers. In minecraft, 2 metres is probably not more than 50 pixels.
In the case of Minecraft, the surface area of the earth * 8
which is 510072000000*8 square metres
=4080576000000 square metres or 4,080,576,000 km2 (just over 4 billion km2)
This is pretty pointless without knowing the distance of one pixel, the the amount of data needed for one pixel, and since the maps are randomly generated, I think Minecraft is out of the question.

What we need is number of pixels, data used by each pixel, and how many pixels make up 1 metre (just to start with).

I did a calculation not so long ago, as follows:

I worked out that to store basic information about every cm2 of our planets surface
(basic information is colour(256 bit), x,y,z position, ocean toggle and surface type), The data file would be

21,513.72 Terabytes in size uncompressed. (21 million Megabytes)(21 thousand Gigabytes)

Most of this data is because of the colour depth. But as you can see if games are to start seriously boasting about having pre rendered planet size maps, we are gonna need bigger hard drives.

So far I think the game FUEL has struck me as having the largest map, and so it did strike the Guinness book of world records too. So I guess that's the answer for now.

 

[philjo]

Some comparisons:

Spoiler

Spoiler

Seriously Guild Wars Nightfall is in the wrong place! I've played through that campaign, I could walk south to north in under an hour. That can't be right.

Really interesting though thanks for that post.

 

[s0m3th1ng]

Jesus, I only have the original game but even then would spend two days playing a medium map against the AI. And that was two days barely moving from my seat. How the hell do you manage 194 planets? Your fleets must have been massive. That game is the most dangerous I've played recently when it comes to addiction.

[/quote]
I was maxed out for hours on fleet training and capital sheep training. I had trade port lines stretching for 20+ planets and all my planets were maxed out on defensive structures. The secret to huge games like that are starbases (become available in Entrenchement)

 

[omicron1]

Well, if MMOs were included, Infinity: Quest for Earth would take top prize no problem, with Eve Online in second.

Practically speaking, the size of Minecraft is limited by the amount of hard disk space you have; with a kilometer taking about a megabyte (estimate) that 8-times-the-size-of-earth map would be approximately 4 petabytes in size. This ain't exactly within the reach of the average consumer's hard disc storage. Practically speaking, a couple gigabytes - a few thousand square kilometers - is a more practical limit, and nearly every game will top out at less than fifty.

Space games tend to blow the lid off the "possible maximum size" argument - it's not an issue at all to generate new star systems, and I once made a simulator that generated literally hundreds of galaxies, each with hundreds of millions of stars, each with up to a dozen planets... but that's not really usable area. I think Dwarf Fortress actually makes the largest useful maps.... but that's just my opinion.

actually, Minecraft maps are randomly generated: as you walk east new scenery is created, whilst the west is deleted and replaced when you go back by something else.

That's not what happens. And it's not what "randomly generated" means.
When you walk east, the game generates scenery. It saves the scenery you leave behind in a series of (many tens of thousands of) files, and loads these when you return. The scenery doesn't change if you revisit the same area over and over - that's why my main Minecraft world is 23mb in size, while new worlds are only ~1.25mb. That's why Cartographer can generate maps of the entire explored world. That's why you see youtube videos with gigantic train rides - because the train, and the terrain around it, are stored to hard disc.

Minecraft is randomly generated. Just not randomly REgenerated. That is all.

Edit: (map sizes) Yeah, Nightfall is way out of scale. They might have been referring to the combined size of the three world maps... or to the size of the "canon" world, rather than the explorable one... then it might work.

Likewise, LOTRO is rather badly outscaled - maybe that's the size of the entire mapped world of Middle Earth, or of the largest dimension, but there's no way the explorable game world itself is that large.

...I also find it quite odd that WoW is so low in the rankings.

 

[mParadox]

just curious though..do you guys actually manage to use all that space? In MinecrafT?

is't the world in minecraft 8 or 16 tims the size of the real earth

Exactly. So what the hell people do with that much space?

 

[Ze_Reaper_Of_Zeath]

Minecraft.



You can never run out of space. Ever.

Our current Minecraft server is 250mb + in size

 

[Fooz]

Mass Effect
[/thread]

False. The flying in space sections don't really count.

Correct answer: Minecraft.
Each generated world is 8 times the size of Earth.
Booyah.

I always seem to be ninja'd on anything Minecraft related.

Anyways: Yeah, Minecraft.
Eight times the surface area of earth!
I don't think any game has beaten that...yet.

and i dont think any game ever will in the forseeable future

 

[Z(ombie)fan]

just curious though..do you guys actually manage to use all that space? In MinecrafT?

you would have to use a single save file for roughly three entire years, and thats not counting the time you spend in mines or anything like that.

so no, no we don't.

 

[Iron_will]

Noctis [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noctis] possibly. Apparently 'The Noctis galaxy, Feltyrion, is approximately 90 thousand light-years in radius'.

 

[Cabamacadaf]

Some comparisons:

Spoiler

Spoiler

Seriously Guild Wars Nightfall is in the wrong place! I've played through that campaign, I could walk south to north in under an hour. That can't be right.

Really interesting though thanks for that post.

Yeah some of them don't seem quite right, if you compare the roads in Burnout Paradise to GTA 3, they're almost as wide as half of one of the islands. But I think most of it is at least close to the real sizes.

 

[ImprovizoR]

I'm gonna say Morrowind because I actually got lost in Morrowind once. The only transport you have are those stillriders. No stillriders around - you walk. And the world just felt so huge when you had to walk everywhere and the road was filled with danger. So maybe geometrically it isn't the biggest world, but it feels like it is.