Such an interesting topic with so many challenges, not quite sure where to start.
The worldbuilding team seems to pack a couple decades worth of experience doing large open world games notably on Ubisoft’s games, which is probably one of the studios with the most expertise in the genre, looking forward to those answers.
Topics that come to mind are authoring/populating/efficient storing: what should we store, generate? Point Clouds everywhere?
1. Is heighfield based landscape rendering still relevant for high-end platforms in 2022?
Beyond the inherent challenges of streaming and rendering at scale, we have seen new behaviours emerging with UE5 notably within the demos put together by Epic, in which open worlds end up being made of tiles of bashed together photogrammetry’ meshes.
Even organic terrain rendering which should be the predilection application for traditionnal heighfield based landscape rendering, ends up overshadowed by the amount of details generated by such an approach, which could fairly well be expanded to any scale.
Any plans to create tools to help create such a new terrain format, creating tiles of meshes and computing their agglomerated collision(marching cube?) within a certain area?
2. Will Unreal Engine have the tools to populate at scale?
The Matrix demo was fantastic and really highlighted how important third party tools like Houdini are to generate that much content at scale, from the city structures, roads, to populating parked cars etc… I there any plans to create some tools to help authoring and populate at scale without relying on third party tools?
3. Anything to look forward to that you can share with us for the future of Unreal 5 ?
Thanks!
Bonus Question: Why does most open-world game nowadays still feel incredibly static: why can’t we break buildings everywhere, dig holes in terrain when our cars explode or our grenades explodes (i am thinking Ubisoft games open-worlds here). Is it purely a design decision?