Hey everyone, first post on the forums. Recently with the launch of 4.8, I’ve decided to attempt a rather ambitious project regarding massive open world terrains. Using World Machine, I’ve created a 50x50 km landscape. Now originally, I used very few tiles as shown in other tutorials here on the forums (4x4 tiles, so 16 total). However, I found that with this size of a landscape, using so few tiles would cover far too vast of an area of the landscape, and I assumed that this would cause performance issues for the player. In addition, the amount of resources necessary to output tiles that large with the resolution and 1:1 m/p ratio was too much.
So I’ve gone to a sort of extreme, and I suppose I’m doing a sanity check. I figured that if I’m creating a 50x50km world, and I want a fairly high resolution terrain, and I want decent performance, then when I needed to do was determine what a “reasonable” chunk of terrain would be for the player to render through level streaming. I estimated that about 500x500 meters was a decent size for a single tile of terrain, and what this results in is 100 x 100 tiles in world machine, so 10,000 total tiles. This is a methodology I found in this post.
Now I don’t know if this is the best way to go about this. I’m not sure how I would go about creating a landscape material for this, as instead of a single splatmap, normal map, or weight map, I’ll have one for each tile of terrain (so again, 10,000 of each file). This was intuitive enough to work with when I created other large worlds, but with few tiles (only 16) and low resolution, but I’m questioning its practicality with large worlds such as this.
Is there a better way to create an open world of this size, with a high resolution, and effectively divide the world into manageable chunks for the player? If this is a valid method, what sort of workflow should I use in order to create a landscape material if I’m using many different image maps, or does it matter?
tl;dr: How do I make a 50x50 km world in World Machine, divide it into small manageable pieces for performance, and maintain a decent terrain resolution so I don’t lose important details (rivers, erosion etc)
I’d really appreciate some feedback/advice.
Pic related, early version of the map.
