Map handling - Indoors/Outdoors and loading large maps

Question

I have two questions regarding the handling of maps.

Question 1. My map will consist of outdoor enviroments as well as dungeons, houses etc. How would I go on about connecting the outdoors with the indoors?

My simple solution to 1. Put everything in the same map file and when you, for example, walk through a door the player will be "teleported" to the indoor location. Let's say the outdoor location of the door is at the coordinates (10,10) and the indoor enviroment of the given house is at (1000,1000) the player's coordinates will be set to (1000,1000) when he walks through the door.

Is this optimal or is there a better way of doing this?

Question 2. My map will consist of a bunch of larger cities and paths connecting these cities. Obviously the map will be pretty big and I'm not sure if I can keep the whole map in memory. How would I go on about creating an effective map management system?

My simple solution to 2. Have the map consist of "chunks" with x*x tiles where x is the number of tiles that will fit in the screen. I would then load the chunk the placer is currently in and also the surrounding chunks but nothing else. When the player moves to a new chunk the map will load new surrounding chunks etc.

Would this be a more effective way of handling the map than loading the entire map into memory? Advantages of this way is that I don't have to keep the entire map in the memory but it will take time to dynamically load each "chunk" when it's needed thus creating loading time.

Any improvements to my rudimentary solutions is gladly appreciated.

Answer 1

Larger game engines typically have entirely different renderers for indoors vs outdoors, especially in FPS games, as the rendering techniques to efficiently handle one are quite different than the other.

A common technique to link the door is to use portals. These can either be polygon click region which simply transitions your avatar on a click, or it can be renderer-integrated and allow switching from indoor to outdoor scenes.

One particularly hard part is ensuring you have all the right resources loaded. In large outdoor scenes, this is often accomplished by loading all nearby "cells" which varying levels of detail based on distance. For indoor scenes there is generally a connectivity graph that can be used for similar purposes. If you have such a portal, use that during your "find nearby cells" logic. If the player is near a portal, preload whatever is on the other side. For click region support, this at least removes the need for loading screens or the like and makes the transition instant. It's outright required for renderer integration.