Creating a persistent map/world

[Sparky]

Hi All,

 

So I'm working on my first game idea. I'm currently working on the basics of my game world in browser and am thinking ahead a little here.

 

I'm going to be using a persistent world, shared by all players, I understand the various ins and outs of a persistent game world, but what I'm struggling to decide is; what's the best approach for creating the persistent world/map in the first place. Options I've considered:

• Build a level builder that can create the world in the DB
• Manually in the DB
• Procedurally create the world using a script that creates the world in the DB

I appreciate that elements of all three are probably useful, but what does everyone else do and have I missed anything?

 

Might be worth me pointing out that my game will have a vaguely tile based map, although I haven't fully decided on the implementation yet. But there will be various squares with different resources, terrain etc.

 

Thanks for your help!