Architecture for Persitent Level Composition

Development Programming & Scripting C++
1

Hello there,

after reading through the Unreal Forums, AnswerHub, Youtube, etc. I am still not sure if I am on the right track for architecting the following scenario. Maybe you can give some advice.

The scenario is the following

  • A RTS game spanning “a world”
  • This world is too big to be modeled at a realistic scale, so a smaller scale has to be implemented, which is fine
  • So this world is composed of several UE4-levels as it is bigger than the current UE4-level limit
  • There are multiple hierarchical layers, ie. seamless views on the game:
    1. The world overview map
    1. The regional strategical map for managing strategic unit movements
    1. The local (battlefield/building) view
  • The whole RTS game should be persistent which means the overall simulation is always running and units/players can move freely in the world
  • The are no separate levels the player can perceive, its just one world simulation
  • The player should be able to seamlessly switch/zoom between different map-views

A general aspect

  • This should NOT be an MMO but there is more than one human player and multple AI players
  • There won’t be too many units, so performance for the underlying simulation is not an issue for now
  • “Actions” on a local view maybe linked to “other” local views

My thoughts on implementing this

  • There is a (UE4 independent?) master simulation which holds all agents and does things like positioning, AI, navigation, state maintanance etc.
  • From this every layer gets the current position of the agents and visualizes them with UE4 engine
  • The overview maps are just UE4 maps, just like the local view
  • This results in a total of 3 map types which are dynamic in regards of the agents

My questions

  • Is this a possible architecture?
  • Is this a good architecture or are there better solutions?
  • What about local / global coordinate systems? All three layers/maps have their own coordinate systems. So there has to be a projection between them?
  • How dows origin shifting relate to the described scenario and the local coordinate systems?
  • Is this architecture the “same as” using sub-levels inside UE4?
  • Would this pose problems when implementing multiplayer?
  • How those this relate to UE4 technologies, terms, features and limitations?

Thank you for taking the time to read this and kind regards.