imrielle wrote:LoL, coding I am not lazy at, hosting however is an issue. Need to find something that isn't going to croak under the load and has plenty of space. I'm guestimating that 1GB of server space is going to be a bare minimum if server maps really are 25,000x25,000 tiles.
The Roanoke map is at least 31,500 x 20,600 pixels from what I've already explored. The south edge has an arbitrary border that could probably be turned off later, the north border is unexplored due to darkness, and the west blocked by a huge mountain. I'd guess it could go to at least 50,000 x 50,000 pixels. The full-detail map tiles average about 1.4 bytes per pixel, but you would also want lower-resolution copies for zoomed-out sections and so forth.
I'd allow at least 5 GB for a whole server map at full detail in PNG format. So long as you do the scaling up front and don't rely on the server to do it on the fly, it shouldn't take much processing power to just hand out pre-scaled tiles. If you use JPEGs instead of PNGs it should compress down to more like 200 MB, and smaller still if you don't have the whole map filled in.
Going futher, there's a
lot of texture repetition in the map tiles. I'd be unsurprised if you could store the whole accessible map with full detail in 100 MB. Taking advantage of that would require a bit of custom code in the map viewer though.