hmmm...I am not sure why there is such a small limit either. Look at what the xbox360 can do with say GTA5 - the map for that is at least tenfold the size of the map in Zoo Tycoon. I know there are other things at work in ZT like economics simulation and animal simulation....but if you look closely the animals are mostly running on animation loops - its not like the game is really simulating random animal behaviour individually. For example the chimps in my zoo all use the climbing frame in the exact same way...an animation that runs for about 15 seconds - it is the same for every enrichment item I have observed with the animals I have watched, there is no real variation.
Then I thought it could be to maximise the framerate. But there is only ever a small amount on screen at any one time in the first person view where you see the animals, guests and zoo objects in any detail. The Zoo view scales down the detail as you zoom out to the point where there are no guests in view at all at the maximum height view where you can see more of the zoo from the top down view.
I do know that Frontier came in for a lot of criticism when they made Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 for the PC. They gave us a massive map and freedom to develope on it - but the sad truth was that at the time unless you had a super massive specced PC, most PC's couldn't handle anything bigger than a small park that covered less than a tenth of the map space available. Even then high end PC's struggled. It was only a couple years later that the tech caught up and became affordable enough for everyone to really build the Park of their dreams. Because people had the freedom of no restrictions on what could be placed, they moaned when the games performance started to dip rather than work within the obvious limits of their PC's abilities. But even thenthis comparison doesn't really work. The game in RCT3 was simulatiing each guest's postion and wants and needs constantly even when not on screen. The guest could run in to the thousands literally on a large park. ZT seems to generate the guests at random when you zoom in. If you zoom out move elsewhere and come straight back to where youwas those guests are gone even though not enough time has passed for them to move away.
Maybe they were relyingon the fact it was directed at the family/ young audience rather than the hardocre Tycoon fans to gloss over these problems?
Then I thought it could be to maximise the framerate. But there is only ever a small amount on screen at any one time in the first person view where you see the animals, guests and zoo objects in any detail. The Zoo view scales down the detail as you zoom out to the point where there are no guests in view at all at the maximum height view where you can see more of the zoo from the top down view.
I do know that Frontier came in for a lot of criticism when they made Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 for the PC. They gave us a massive map and freedom to develope on it - but the sad truth was that at the time unless you had a super massive specced PC, most PC's couldn't handle anything bigger than a small park that covered less than a tenth of the map space available. Even then high end PC's struggled. It was only a couple years later that the tech caught up and became affordable enough for everyone to really build the Park of their dreams. Because people had the freedom of no restrictions on what could be placed, they moaned when the games performance started to dip rather than work within the obvious limits of their PC's abilities. But even thenthis comparison doesn't really work. The game in RCT3 was simulatiing each guest's postion and wants and needs constantly even when not on screen. The guest could run in to the thousands literally on a large park. ZT seems to generate the guests at random when you zoom in. If you zoom out move elsewhere and come straight back to where youwas those guests are gone even though not enough time has passed for them to move away.
Maybe they were relyingon the fact it was directed at the family/ young audience rather than the hardocre Tycoon fans to gloss over these problems?
