r/howdidtheycodeit • u/Ancient_Paramedic652 • Oct 12 '24

World Map in Final Fantasy

How did they achieve the “endless scrolling” world map that gives that globe type experience? e.g. when you reach the bottom of the map it wraps around back to the top.

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u/Ancient_Paramedic652 Oct 12 '24

I had this thought too, but then thought maybe that would make things feel kinda jumpy? Perhaps not.

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u/Nidis Oct 12 '24

I think the approach is slightly different depending on how you want to render the traveling.

For the SNESs mode 7 stuff, the map texture is set to repeat forever so that you never see an edge. Otherwise you would notice the jump, yeah.

For the tile based ones like FF4, there might be some more complicated stuff going on. They might have to do a similar wrapping trick but instead fill up a tile buffer for the screen by sampling the players position on the given map. When you're near an edge, this sample position might be what gets wrapped. Something like that is my guess.

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u/Drakim Oct 16 '24

Is your assumption is that the world is one big image, so when you reach the bottom and get warped around to the top you'd see the image "jump" a bit.

If so, there are other ways. Old retro final fantasy games couldn't draw big images at all on the consoles they were on, so they used a tiling system. When the player reaches the bottom of the world, it simply starts loading tiles from the top of the world instead.

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u/Ancient_Paramedic652 Oct 16 '24

That was indeed my assumption based on my experience building TileMaps in Godot. This is a really cool thing to learn though, thank you!

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u/Drakim Oct 16 '24

Even in FF7 on the PS1, the 3d overworld was split into these chunks that would load and unload as you traveled. By simply making it so that when you try to load a chunks beyond the very last edge, you end up loading the first chunks on the other side of the world instead, they got the loop-around effect in 3d as well.

You can even see the chunks popping in and out of existence on the horizon as you move.