Developers are using the term 'mega map' a lot. What is the mega map?
TL;DRThe mega map is one small map loaded at the start that never gets replaced; objects around you are streamed instead, allowing switching between single and multiplayer without loading screens.
Mega map is just a funny way to term it, I guess, because actually there's nothing really mega about it. It's really small. It's a tiny, tiny map. And the beauty of it is that it does every other map. So the meaning of that is that the engine, Lumberyard, has a concept of levels, right? And some people call these stages or however you want to call it. But basically there's a whole preload section that happens, and there's a concept of: this level exists in a space. It's got four kilometers by four kilometers or however big you want to call it. But there is a hard concept of a load of an area. Basically what we've done is just got rid of that entire concept completely, which is pretty fundamental within the engine. And instead we load one map, and actually it's really small. And then what we load is objects within it and around you. So a mega map is actually just a singular map that can support every other map.
The other cool part about that is we can shunt from single player to multiplayer and back even within that mega map. So you actually exist in one map. We load everything around you. And the nice part about that is, again, there is no offline loading screen that you have to go to. So if you want to go back to your hangar from Arena Commander, it's an instantaneous thing. We actually just stream the objects around you. And again, this required us to work a ton on the streaming that the engine does. When you have a concept of level, you can just preload a whole bunch of stuff and then stream in just the things that you need. But now, because we don't even have that concept, we have to get rid of all that preload that happened before and stream everything as much as possible. And that's something that we work on a lot. So I don't know if that really explained it well. Hopefully some people understand what mega map means. It's really just: we load one map at the start of the game, and we never load another map. We just load things around you, is the idea.