Instance Maps?

[Rezeyu]

The way mine work, is it basically has a pseudo NPC wander around till it hits a map edge, wherever it stepped = path.

then fill in the rest of the areas with the tileset's upper wall, then loop through the X/Y, and whenever a path is directly below the upper one, set a middle tile there instead.

Spawn NPCs however you like, then set anything that's not the ground tile to TILE_BLOCKED.

Mine's a bit more complete than that, but that's the gist of how it works.

[Kousaten]

Make copies of the maps in question and maybe when the player (preferably group with this method) goes into an instance, have the server run checks on the maps to make sure there's no one in them in their particular groupings. If one of the map groupings is open, let them warp to it.

It's probably just a silly way of doing it, but it's one step forward.

*waits for everyone else to make the leaps*

XD

EDIT: Just read Rezeyu's post and that sounds really awesome. :3

[Rezeyu]

Well it depends on your setting also.

It mgiht be less laggy/more beneficial in general to have like templates.

Say one is an elbow bend, one is straight, one is diagonal, etc. then jsut place them randomly according to the link up points.

[Kousaten]

Saves map space, I suppose. :3

[Rezeyu]

Well for mine that doesn't work, since I don't deal with instances, mine's for plain map generation, I jsut figured it's the same idea.

XD

[Robin]

Keep in mind that the maps don't change at all when players go on, so just instance the players, npcs and dropped items.

[grimsk8ter11]

You could always do exactly what dave said, using robins information. An instance map type that lets only epople in the aprty be sent to the player when it updates player information on map load. The only problem with that that needs a work around is possibly working on instancing through a dynamic array NPCs and items so npcs arent randomly disappearing.