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Can I implement "multiple dimensions" somehow?

Development Discussion Content Creation
#1

Hello a,

this is my first post here, so apologies if this is the wrong forum for it. First of all, I am very impressed by the Unreal Engine. I have been working on an Indy game for a while now, using 3 different engines over the years and quite frankly, now that I started to learn the Unreal Engine, I am crying my eyes out over those wasted years.
Oh well.

Now, here is what I am thinking about doing: I want to make a city landscape with houses and house interiors. The house interiors should contain decoration objects and so on and the player will be able to enter a house through the door. Since this will run over a network, I don’t want all the decorations of all the houses within visibility range to be transmitted or loaded to a character who is wandering the streets, only when he goes through a door should those items become available.

In my current implementation, where I do everything down to the nitty gritty network level myself, I added a “dimension” value to each object so that only objects that are in the same dimension as the player will be transmitted to his client.

Is it possible to achieve something like this with the Unreal engine and how would I address this? Or am I thinking on a level that is too low here? The decorative items will only be held on the server, so I must tell the clients when they enter the house to load the meshes and place the objects on the correct position, they will not be stored in the scene on the client.

Thanks for any advice

#2

You could probably just make the house a different map entirely and using level streaming.

So, that way, when a player enteres the house, the stuff in the house spawns, but the stuff outside it despawns.

Though, I’m not sure if doing this would effect EVERYONE or just the player going into the house.

I’d like some backup on this if possible.

~ Jason

#3

I also would suggest level streaming for something like this. The Docs also go over something similar to yours
Docs

#4

Not sure as to the reasoning as to the question.

A map object that is not with in the visible range of the rendering viewport is culled and not rendered.

If the thinking that object exclusion would increase network performance a UE4 client is a lot less dependent on the server as to the current game state except for replication.