free-roaming

free-roaming

1. present participle and gerund of free-roam

free-roaming (comparative more free-roaming, superlative most free-roaming)

1. (video games) Allowing the player to move freely through a virtual world or choose the game narrative and objectives at will; an open world.
   • 2009, Wendy Despain, Writing for Video Game Genres: From FPS to RPG, →ISBN, page 49:

     While Metroid introduced multiple endings to a linear game, other more recent designs have presented free-roaming worlds incorporating multiple gameplay paths.

   • 2009, Michael Duggan, Wii Game Creation for Teens, →ISBN, page 294:

     Let the player trigger these in any order she chooses; this is vital because the game ceases being static and takes on the illusion of a free-roaming game.

   • 2013, Matt Fox, The Video Games Guide, →ISBN:

     Its free-roaming world was a departure for both the programmer and for console gamers, and in retrospect it was an ambitious undertaking that could have all gone horribly wrong.

2. Having the ability to move about unconstrained by reins, leashes, fences, cages, barns, and so on.
   • 2001, Chilco Choate, The Fire Still Burns, →ISBN, page 51:

     From the distance of today, my guess is that it was the free-roaming horses that had most to do with the increase in carnivores, mainly because nobody was trying to protect them.

   • 2004, Kosher Chicken from Canada, →ISBN, page 1-5:

     Further, the chickens are free-roaming, which means that it is necessary for the farmers to closely watch what the birds ingest.

   • 2005, William J. Fielding, Jane Mather, Maurice Isaacs, Potcakes: Dog Ownership in New Providence, the Bahamas, →ISBN, page 57:

     As indicated in the Introduction, free-roaming dogs have "always" been a feature of New Providence's environment and they have "always" been considered a "nuisance" or "problem."

   • 2010, Rebecca Solnit, Mona Caron, A California Bestiary, →ISBN, page 10:

     By 1985, there were nine free-roaming condors left on earth and a few more in zoos.

   • 2012, The Praeger Handbook of Environmental Health - Volume 1, →ISBN, page Robert H. Friis:

     Since free-roaming cats may come into the yard, any sandboxes should be covered when not in use to prevent cats from defecating in them.

3. (astronomy) Not orbiting a gravitational center.
   • 2005, Neil J C Spooner, Vitaly Kudryavtsev, The Identification of Dark Matter, →ISBN, page 183:

     Microlensed double-image quasars have sent a consistent message that the baryonic dark matter consists of a dark population of free-roaming planet mass objects.

   • 2012, David Braun, National Geographic Tales of the Weird, →ISBN:

     This would offer an explanation for some of the free-roaming planets that have been found and it could mean that more exist across the Milky Way.

   • 2013, David Stevenson, Under a Crimson Sun: Prospects for Life in a Red Dwarf System, →ISBN:

     There are some suggestions that these free-roaming worlds may outnumber stars by several orders of magnitude, dominating the population of objects in the universe.