LÖVE

Recently I was thinking about making an exploration/puzzle game. It would have a *huge* open-world style map. The game itself would be quite simple, but that's not the point of this post. The point is how to load maps.

I want to load maps form some external file, probably a image or a text file. The problem I have is this:

I want the game to be reasonably fast. I think it would take a lot of time to load the entire map at one time, and take up a lot of memory (I haven't tested this yet). I also thought about having it load small chunks of the map when they were needed, but that might create lag when you move to the edge or corner of a chunk.

TL;DR: What is the best way to load a large map file without lag or long loading time?

Thanks,
Nsmurf

Try looking at Orthorobot's level loading code.

Well, you can split the map into subsets. At startn load only the visible area.
Then, according to the moving direction of the player, load the next/following parts.

Also, it seems love.thread would be perfect for that.

What the previous guys say.

Do what google maps does. Don't load the whole thing, divide it in small grids and load them/unload them as needed. You will want to organize the code so that you can use it in both the game and the level editor.