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[Robotacon]

While working on my platform game, that uses png-files for map and tiles data, I'm feeling more and more that there must be a game where the map is open and distributed kind of like how web sites are hyperlinked to each other.

Does anyone know of such a game?

I'm thinking that it shouldn't be hard to create, for instance, a Zelda clone that is played on one huge map where parts of the world are created and hosted by independent map makers. This would create a Zelda "cyberspace" that wouldn't be controlled by any one game creator and that could be played in 1P mode without the need for a persistant world.

If one was to create a persistant world it's a whole different ball game and then one would need atleast one server that keeps track of multi player support and where everything is and what not.

Again, are there games like this already that I don't know about?

/R

[Derek]

Graal Online, perhaps?  I haven't played it myself, but it sounds very similar to what you're describing.

http://www.graalonline.com/playerworlds/

[ravuya]

A lot of early MUDs had user tools that let them design the world as they were playing it. Obviously they didn't host those components from their own machines.

I remember hearing that Furcadia let you implement 'dreams' (realms) with scripting and everything and then upload them to the server. This is also not hosted from the user's own machine.

I think you'd really have a lot of problems doing that sort of thing: security being the paramount concern, but also availability and performance.

Obviously, though, if it's a non-persistent world, I've seen that done before. I remember some older Mac game that had a bunch of user-hosted worlds that would hook up to a centrally dispatched server. It was something like "Dreamz" but I'll be damned if I can remember the name right now.

[Robotacon]

Graal Online is one huge step in the right direction (perhaps too far). It would be even cooler if the levels were more distributed so that you could have different screens hosted on different servers.

If I get time some spare time over I'll make a simple game engine and create one screen and then let anyone create the adjacent screens. It would be like iso-city but playable. Extremely dull if there is only one screen but probably pretty cool if it keep growing. 

...and there would be nothing stopping the map from mutation since people can change the ones they host at any time.

[Xion]

Sounds awesome...
So...it would be single-player, just with shared user-created content? Like Spore, only having each planet hosted individually to the respective owners...?

[Robotacon]

Don't trick me into saying it's like Spore

I would like to compare it with what squidi talks about here. Squidi leans alot on HOW to create a distributed world and how to link them together and that's where he's dropping the ball in my opinion.

I would have one server that keeps the integrety of a grid of screens intact. This server works only as a tracker that stores links to each screen. It might sound crazy to go as deep as hosting individual screens but I really think it needs to be extremely distributed. This server could have a cache of game data that is updated daily so you still can play the game if some hosts are down.

I would store some game data in image files so that anyone could create a screen with a simple drawing program. Kind of like how easy it is to create a webpage with notepad. There's no need to store binary data in these images. I've tried before to store scripts in image form using symbols but that too feels like a stretch. Most likely XML would be a great way to store data in too since it can be easily created and easily verified. This would also make it possible to view the whole map using a browser.

I think Legend of Zelda is a great game to apply this to. It needs to be a simple game with simple game mechanics, then over time one can introduce more and more features.