Approach to create Post apocalyptic Open world

Development World Creation
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1

What or how should I approach to make open world level which includes biome, railway tracks, 1-2 cities for a zombie game such as days gone but with optimization. So far I’ve seen these methods for optimization

  1. World Partition
  2. LODs
  3. HISM
  4. Level Streaming
    Don’t want to end up in a mess or blunder, so I need to do alot of planning and discussion. If anyone knows anything or any idea, please share.
2

You doing this from wrong end of the stick.

Let me explain why: you make whole level, spend 1-2 years doing it, while doing it you put some “advanced” stuff like nanite, quixel materials, weather, virtual textures with seamless mixing, footprints, landscape with foliage, you put as much as you can cramp into it. Yes i am guilty of same stuff. Then you start coding your project, deploy it, and you realize that only powerfull PC can run it.

Then you try to code that open world, and:

  • you find out that unloaded, then loaded actor resets to default state, so all your quests traps etc, will need dedicated code
  • you find out that nice crowd of zombies requires MassEntity which is about as polished as tech demo, not production/game ready
  • you will try things like Motion Matching for animations
  • Game Ability System
  • Mutable Plugin
  • State Trees for player and zombies

And problem with all of this doing from wrong end of stick, is that you wasted all resources (cpu, ram, vram) on high res textures to make that nanite ground look really nice.

So now to fit gameplay systems you need to scratch whole level and do gameplay systems first.

Also: zombie and player movement, zombies horde size etc, all this defines level layout.

oh and google about:
“kingdom come deliverance interview about unreal”

They made open world game, you should know about those devs opinion on unreal.

3

So basically, I’d have to resize and remap textures of the world. My game is designed to have these gameplays

  1. Zombie horde (spawned and sleeping but at night will be roaming)
  2. Player + it’s vehicle
  3. Survival camps
  4. Cities and Biomes (with random resources spawn)
  5. Zombies
  6. Player’s base (base building)
    Ik this is complex that’s why I cannot sacrifice everything on world, but I also need make sure it looks visually good even with lower textures resolution. Also, level designing is hard as compared to gameplay since I’m much more of a programmer and not that creative. So I just don’t want to start without any good planning or not knowing any aspect of unreal that can help me