Unlimited Map Dimensions for a game in AS3 - actionscript-3

Question

Recently I've been planning out how I would run a game with an environment/map that is capable of unlimited dimensions (unlimited being a loose terms as there's obviously limitations on how much data can be stored in memory, etc). I've achieved this using a "grid" that contains level data stored as a String that can be converted to a 2D Array that would represent objects and their properties.
Here's an example of two objects stored as a String:
"game.doodads.Tree#200#10#terrain$game.mobiles.Player#400#400#mobiles"
The "grid" is a 3D Array, of which the contents would represent the x/y coordinate of the grid cell. The grid cells would be, say, 600x600.
An example of this "grid" Array would be as follows:
var grid:Array = [[["leveldata: 0,0"],["leveldata 0,1"]],
[["leveldata: 1,0"],["leveldata 1,1"]]];
The environment will handle loading a grid square and it's 8 surrounding squares based on a given point. ie the position of the Player. It would have a function along the lines of
function loadCells(xp:int, yp:int):void
This would also handle the unloading of the previously loaded cells that are no longer close enough to be required. In the unload process, the data at grid[x][y] would be overwritten with the new data, which is created by looping through the objects in that cell and appending each new set of data to the grid cell data.
Everything works fine in terms of when you move in a direction, cells are unloaded/saved and new cells are loaded. The problem is this:
Say this is a large city infested by zombies. If you walk three grid squares in any direction and return, everything is as you left it. I'm struggling to find a way to at least simulate all objects still moving around and doing their thing. It looks silly when you for example throw a grenade, walk away, return and the grenade still hasn't detonated.
I've considered storing a timestamp on each object when I unload the level, and when it's initialized there's a loop that runs it's "step" function amount of times. Problem here is obviously that when you come back 5 minutes later, 20 zombies are going to try and step 248932489 times and the game will crash.
Ideas?

Answer 1

I don't know AS3 but let me try give you some tips.
It seems you want to make a seamless world since you load / unload cells as a player moves. That's a good idea. What you should do here is deciding what data a cell should load / unload( or, even further, what data a cell should hold or handle ).
For example, the grenade should not be unloaded by the cell as it needs to be updated even after the player leaves the cell. It's NOT a good idea for a cell to manage all game objects just because they are located in the cell. Instead, the player object could handle the grenade as an owner. Or, there could be one EntityManager which handles all game entities like grenades or zombies.
With this idea, you can update your 20 zombies even when they are in an unloaded zone (their location does not matter anymore) instead of calling update() 248932489 tiems at once. However, do you really need to keep updating the zombies? Perhaps, unloading all of them and spawning new zombies with the number of the latest active zombies in the cell would work. It depends on your game design but, usually, you don't have to update entities which are not visible or far enough from the player. Hope it helps. Good luck! :D

Answer 2

Interesting problem. Of course, game cannot simulate unlimited environment precisely. If you left some zone for a few minutes, you don't need every step of zombies (or any actors there) to be simulated precisely. Every game has its own simplications. Maybe approximate simulation will help you. For example, if survivor was in heavily infested zone for a long time, your simulator could decide that he turned into zombie, without computing every step of the process. Or, if horde was rampant in some part of the city, this part should be damaged randomly.

Answer 3

I see two methods as to how you could handle this issue.
first: you have the engine keep any active cells loaded, active means there are object-initiated events involving cell-owned objects OR player-owned objects (if you have made such a distinction that is). Each time such a cell is excluded from normal unloading behaviour it is assigned a number and if memory happens to run out the cells which have the lowest number will be unloaded. Clearly, this might be the hardest method code-wise but still it might be the only one truly doing what you desire.
second: use very tiny cells and let the engine keep a narrow path loaded. The cells migth then be 100x100 instead of 600x600 and 36 of them do the work one bigger cell would do ( risk: more cluttter code-wise) then each cell your player actually traverses ( not all that have been loaded to produce a natural visibility-range ) is kept in memory including every cell that has player-owned objects in it for a limited amount of time ( i.e. 5 minutes ).
I believe you can find out how to check for these conditions upon unloading yourself and hope to have been of help to you.