Over the last few months, I’ve been working on my own little project which was a homage to my old favorite game world from the '80s and '90s. I’ve been building the landmass in World Machine (I’ve been so passionate about the project that I splurged and bought the product) and am now looking at importing it into UE4. The issues I have is that it’s BIG and that I didn’t really have a game idea to go around it. The latter is what’s attracted me to making it an ARK mod. The former however may be an issue and I’d like to get some guidance as to whether it’s possible to use even ARK or whether it’s just TOO big.
The total map size is close to 1000sp km. The total map size is 2304 2km square tiles. The main landmass is reasonably smaller and probably takes up about 30% of the map. Several smaller islands make up around another 20% and the rest is ocean … LOTS of ocean. Those smaller islands though would still be pretty huge (when compared to the original ARK island).
This is the “orbital view” if the map. Some of you may even recognise it. But don’t let that view fool you. It’s very abstracted when viewed through to WM tool at that height. There is a massive amount of detail when you zoom right in.
Because of the size of the map, my plan was to include several biomes. Northern Pine/Yew woodland and marshland, temperate grassland, forests and marshes and tropical savanna and (you guessed it) jungle and swamps. I also have a wasteland area where “something” happened. I’d planned to include mines, caves, dungeons and ruins of the “old cities”, with cellars, crypts and other things to explore. It’s an expansive (and very ambitious) project. As such, I’m hoping that ARK will one day be able to support biomes (at least I’m hoping it’s part of your roadmap or not).
The three most vital questions I have are:
Do you support tiled maps that big or are you able to support any map sizes supported by UE4?
Are you looking at supporting different biomes with distinct temperature ranges?
I haven’t looked at the spawning mechanics in the SDK, but how flexible are they with regard to when they spawn critters? Can you specify spawning x critters and then no more for a period of time (I want to avoid players farming cellars for spider chitin, but I want a reason for people to explore places).
Are the assets in the game fixed or do you allow assets to be imported? I’m looking at an mechanism/blueprint that will allow me to at least procedurally texture all areas for me. If possible, I’d like to procedurally generate the forests and ground cover too (which will make doing the overland areas that much easier).
I know this is an ambitious project. I’m hoping I can make it come to fruition. It’s giving me something to create and aim for anyway rather than simply sitting back and playing games.
EDIT: I’ve just discovered /playlist?list=PLp46z1UxQR1vo4FTLHe3ifYOhXgUWaBz9. It looks like that will answer some of my questions.
I would greatly limit your scope (size of island), fill it in with quality content.
In theory you could use world composition but in UE4 it really only works with single player out of the box, and does not account for networked origin shifting, and load balancing between servers.
Ark is ~64 square miles(8 by 8 if im not mistaken), and server performance is already very much a concern.
Do you support tiled maps that big or are you able to support any map sizes supported by UE4?
I have not mapped on UE4 but from what all I have read so far if you feel that the persistent map is too large you can always just break it up in to sections like the normal map has done with the caves. Clearly it will require some ingenuity doing it this way to hide the loading (like say a valley one must pass through). Even as large of a map as that I bet the engine will run it, just maybe not well.
Are you looking at supporting different biomes with distinct temperature ranges?
There are already different biomes in the base game with distinct temperature ranges. Check out the testmap and look at the areas labeled hotspot, etc.
I haven’t looked at the spawning mechanics in the SDK, but how flexible are they with regard to when they spawn critters? Can you specify spawning x critters and then no more for a period of time (I want to avoid players farming cellars for spider chitin, but I want a reason for people to explore places).
Spawners, much like loot tables, are easily adjusted in blueprint defaults in the Ark Dev Kit. For example, open up the dev kit and search for the blueprint named “DinoSpawnEntries_DeepWater”. In there it is pretty self explanatory however you will see several sets, and weights assigned to those sets (since games like randomness).
Are the assets in the game fixed or do you allow assets to be imported? I’m looking at an mechanism/blueprint that will allow me to at least procedurally texture all areas for me. If possible, I’d like to procedurally generate the forests and ground cover too (which will make doing the overland areas that much easier).
You can use whatever assets you like, however you may want to read over the terms of use since I expect it to be difficult to keep full ownership over such assets you import or create. Also, make sure you have rights to use whatever assets you are importing.
ARK’s server and game code do not use World Origin Shifting, so maps are effectively limited in size to about 7km x 7km. TheIsland map can be considered maximum size when you include all of the underwater ocean area that goes to the edge of the map.
We probably won’t be increasing the size of the world any time soon. We did already increase it to 7x7, so you have a bit more room to work with than default 4.5.1. That being said, if you have played ARK, 7x7 km is actually quite huge and we have intentionally created a non-realistic world scale that is more accommodating to gameplay (sizes of mountains, rivers, ocean depth, etc).
Thanks for the reply. The ARK island is pretty huge already. I recognise that. It’s disappointing that I won’t be able to leverage off this game, but it’s always been my dream (perhaps a foolish dream) to realise that particular game world in a scale that does it justice. I’ve been wanting to do something like this since the days of UO. I may just have to go my own way on this project then.
Yes sorry about that! As mentioned previously there are a lot of things to consider when filling up a multiplayer game world, especially since the server(s) simulate most entities and clients everywhere. There are quite simply some tough precision problems that span all systems in the game and this is the reason that even the latest Unreal Engine does not support such large multi-player maps out-of-the-box.
You’ll still have to pretty much roll your own server system MMO-style to accomplish what you’re after. In the mean time, however, ARK might be a great place to test some of your gameplay ideas!
Beautiful ;] As jrapczak suggested, you should try working on a smaller area, like the town of Britannia and it’s surroundings(which is already too big, imo hahah). Every journey begins with a step.
I concur. Don’t shoot for the moon if its not realistic. Also as someone with 300+ hours into Ark at this point I’d say anything even double the size of theisland would be WAY too much land unless there was a WAY higher player cap.
I have only increased the size of the island slightly with my new terrain and seems to be stable for now… but tried something that had at least 40% extra landmass and it was problematic… Remember that the joy of a mod is for other people to try them out… so you must keep other peeps in mind.