A few questions regarding level design as far as landscape/map size/etc

Development World Creation
1

So let me start off by saying I am looking at wanting to create a world that would roughly be the size of Chicago Illinois.

I have been watching a lot of videos on World Machine and I have watched some other videos about importing heightmaps and such and am not sure what is the best route to go.

The world wouldn’t really have any if any mountains but there would be some slight hills and such but it being mainly city obviously there would mainly flat land.

With that being said as well what are some techniques that are good to go with to have the edges of the map not just end or not just have invisible barriers or is there no real way around not having some sort of barrier invisible or not?

TLDR:
#1. Is World Machine the best option to go with for landscaping or for simple landscapes is best to just use unreal alone?
#2. Barriers, invisible walls, or other technique for making boundaries for the map without the world just coming to an end of nothingness?

2

  1. Probably. You’ll never produce something that large entirely by hand, it would take forever. Chicago (city) covers 600km^2, the urban area 5500km^2. Realistically, I doubt you could do anything meaningful with that amount of space anyway.

  2. It’s usually better to ensure a player never gets there. Impassable features like water, canyons or mountains go a long way to achieving this.

3

For question #1 then would it be best to maybe cut that size in half? or even smaller than that? This is something I am actually going to be working on for a long time and not worried about how long it takes, just want to produce something quality in the end.

4

Assume that it might take you two full days to fill a square kilometre with a minimum amount of meaningful content, and another couple to polish (if you really know what you’re doing), and work from there.

The Chicago urban area on these estimates would take you 60 years of daily work to complete.

5

Well **** :confused:

If you can what would you recommend to scale some as dense as chicago down to that would be manageable but still seem like its a decent size?

7
  1. I personally would use a combination of both -> create the landscape in world machine - in the ue4 add some more details and edit it - in world machine you can add some erosion or such stuff - import it again :slight_smile: