The first brave subscriber to intentionally try to cross a region border.

So it’s finally happening; subscribers can now actually travel between MMO regions. Pictured here is the very first subscriber to decide to travel from one region to another, immediately before passing from one region into the other.

Not pictured is the game universe abruptly exploding a few seconds later, because the system couldn’t cope with him having moved into a new region.

After a few minutes of bugfixing, though, we had this:

The first mass migration of subscribers from one region to another, viewed from very high up.

Just barely visible in the middle of that pass is a line of subscribers, traveling single-file (need to fix that), crossing the boundary between regions as they travel from one region (where they started) to an adjacent one (where there are quests available).  And the world not exploding as it happens.  (The white lines shown in both screenshots represent path obstructions.  We ignore those while traveling across a mountain pass, but otherwise characters will try to avoid crossing any of those lines)

So the game’s pathfinding system can now cope with any length journey;  subscribers may travel through any number of regions to reach their destination, and if there’s an available path, they’ll find it.  Note that there’s no real ‘AI’ hooked up to this travelling yet;  for these tests, I simply cheated and made AI aware of available activities in adjacent, accessible regions.  But the mechanics of how to actually move from one region to another was definitely the hard part, here;  now that I can get the characters to physically travel through the mountain passes, making them intelligently decide when they’d like to do it is the easy part.

Getting this to work took a lot more time and effort than I expected, so I don’t think I’ll quite have the milestone 7 build finished by the end of this week.  But I’m very close.  Definitely within the next four or five days, just to give me time to really bed down the subscriber AI logic for when to travel from one region to another.

More updates soon, as the Milestone 7 build approaches!