Best way to create and Populate 100km Square Island?

Development Rendering
1

What would be the best way to create and populate a 100km Square island?

It would have a few different sectors including:

  • 2 mountain ranges
  • beaches
  • caves/rivers
  • a Lake
  • Forests
  • Desolate terrain, mostly rocks and sand

How would one go about mapping out such a large map?
I figure it would need to be 12km*12km area to have at least 2km of water to navigate in

2

Look up “procedural terrain generation”

This site has a massive amount of links and research on the subject.

This video from the 2013 Sigraph also talks about current research.

://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_generation also has more links and data.

3
  1. use the world browser ?v=fUx8vLosDLY
  2. I personally would also use the foliage tool to place all the vegetation stuff
  3. when you create the landscape in world machine/terresculptor you could also create layer weights (so that the terrain is already painted)
  4. all other stuff that is important for such big maps -> culling, lods
4

I will be using WorldMachine to make the map. Going to look up more about procedural generation.
Vegetation is tough apparently, hope I figure itout. Layerweights? Will look that up, no idea whatthat is.

Also culling/lods, do I have to individually assign it?

What i mean is:

I have Speedtree
WorldMachine

Can I create a 100km square island using this? I’ll get the height data off a real island using google earth.

5

It wont be easy because of the size but yes, you definitely can.

6

I am having trouble figuring out how many players it will fit at a time. Thing is the game works even if there it’s singleplayer, or up to 10,000 people online easily.

So I want to make sure the island will fit as many players as possible before I have to make an expansion

7

This has way more to do with how you code the rest of your game, namely the multiplayer aspect.

Out of the box Unreal’s networking isn’t going to support anywhere near 10,000 people on one server. You’re going to have to come up with the balancing on your own, and whether you are going to try to do something like instancing (let a few people connect to a ‘copy’ of an area at a time), sharding (same map on N servers but only X players can connect to each server), splitting the map up (such that say, every 1km square is a different server). Any way you do it you’re going to reach a peak of " # of players connected to server" (and it’s going to be way less than 10k.) Even games like Eve Online that have many thousands of players in ‘one’ server do this by splitting the map up into different servers, they’re just all ‘connected’. When you see the ‘epic’ battles, sure they might have 6-7k people in one area, but the game falls to like <1fps and at this point you still actually have multiple servers involved (load balancing for network at this point.)

All of those are problems you’ll have to design around/towards based on what kind of game you’re making. If you’re going for an FPS with accurate hitboxes you need a fast simulation rate and are not going to be able to fit more than 60~ people on any one server at a time, there’s a reason that limit has stuck around for years - it’s a point of bandwidth not necessarily resources on the server. If you’re doing something turn based though you’re going to be able to optimize your backend to be much more like a JSON/SOAP service and you can support a few thousand people - but it’s not going to be ‘real time’ in the way that FPS games are.

So you need to decide what kind of interactions will be in your game, and work towards a network model that fits that idea. Pretty much the only thing that Unreal supports out of the box (without you doing other work I mean) is the typical client->server model that you’d see in games that use a similar network model, counterstrike, battlefield, COD, etc.

TL;DR there’s no easy way to say how many players it will fit at a time, it depends on what type of game you’re making, how it’s going to be played, and your ability to implement anything beyond the standard that’s included (which I’d venture a guess would be about like unreal tournament, 30-60 players as a on each ‘server’.)

8

You won’t need World Machine then- unless you want to feed the height data into it and then create splat maps. If so you’ll need the pro edition to make tiled worlds.

For a 100km square map, doing maximum recommended resolution from Epic, you will need a height map that is roughly 20,322 x 20,322 pixels, broken up into multiple sections. The of which will be around 8k.

Importing is fairly simple- here are the docs:

https://docs.unrealengine/latest/INT/Engine/Landscape/Creation/index.html

Once you have your landscapes, you will need to use the World Composition tool to assemble them:

https://docs.unrealengine/latest/INT/Engine/LevelStreaming/WorldBrowser/index.html

9

Ah great, I saw some great progress on World Machine on creating terrains though.

Also by 10,000 Players I meant scattered all over the map, not in 1 place at the same time. I do want to get up to 50 - 100 players into the same spot though.

Games like ESO, GW2 etc easily manage 300 players, wondering what kind of architecture they have in place. Either way how many players is something for much much later.

The game will be divided into zones, however I do want them all to be on the same gameworld, no different gameworlds.