As per ZwiftInsider’s article on an upcoming feature:
“You can initiate a teleport from your action bar, and your avatar’s movement will appear as a straight line on your post-activity map.”
This is very welcome; and removes one of the final barriers to us being able to ride freely between worlds in a single activity.
Also the new Segment Portal feature:
Join other Zwifters and ride through these two new portals to experience some of the real world’s most famous climbs.
It’d be great if Zwift now added gateway portals between worlds. e.g. Turn right along the Watopia beachfront, go through the portal and emerge in London. There could be several of these to different worlds, either in a primary location a bit like the portal room in WoW, or dotted around the world.
My point is that there’s no longer any reason not to, the tech exists (see the Segment Portal feature), and having a straight line connecting two separate points within an activity now has precedent.
Except that, within the same world, all of the assets are loaded at the start of the ride. If you were to teleport to another world it would seemingly require that one set of assets be offloaded and another set loaded.
I don’t see why it wouldn’t be possible to pre load a different world and then choose to teleport once it is ready, if you start a ride it takes a while to load the world, but if you save and start a new one in the same world it loads straight away.
so you click to say you want to teleport to Makuri doing the wandering flatlands course or whatever, you carry on cycling where you were then once it is ready you click okay and away you go.
then don’t allow it on them - why stop some people doing something because others can’t.
or allow it for smaller worlds? loading paris and innsbruck would be no problem for anything that can load makuri or watopia.
if loading two worlds is a problem then it really does stop any future expansion of watopia/makuri and we’ll just have endless small worlds which, in my opinion, is not a good way to go.
We know that won’t happen, Zwift are for the masses , they won’t exclude the base. Take steering most events don’t allow steering because only some have a device.
Yes I assume we are already hitting the max with those two worlds. I wont expect a lot of new roads on them.
Loading two worlds could help if the next world someone wanted is predictable, and in theory that’s possible if the portals are in different places. If I’m riding towards the portal to London, then it could be loaded once I’m within 1km of it for example, and removed from memory once I get 1km away again. On more capable computers, all worlds and assets could probably sit in memory at all times.
I don’t think smaller devices is a blocker. The experience might not be as slick if they can’t load enough assets in advance, but those users could just have the short delay while the map is loaded. It’d be no worse than changing to an event on a different map, and people are used to hanging tight in that scenario.
I certainly don’t think it’s necessary to stifle innovation and features because the experience isn’t as good on some platforms. After all, Apple TV support exists, and that’s pretty sub-standard compared to using a PC, mouse and keyboard. For example, I’ve yet to work out how to click the orange thumb in the Riders Nearby list.
Let’s assume you’re in Watopia and you want to go to London. If you somehow entered Portalworld then Watopia would no longer be needed. London could be loaded to overwrite it and then you could exit Portalworld when London is loaded. Assuming all of the game assets are already on the client device, there shouldn’t be a network impact either.
A small portal world could be a solution (similar to the WoW portal room idea I mentioned before), although to smooth out hitches it’d still need to know which map you want to load next.
If the portal map was wide enough that it takes, say, at least 30 seconds to ride along the relevant road, that might be enough.
Yep, that makes sense overall. I don’t imagine it’d work for races at all, although some “fondo” style events might still work, where it isn’t about riding as a group as such, more riding the route.