a few friends an I have decided that we want to create a game. We have finished finding the concept, now we are looking for an engine that allows us to realize what we want to do.
Basically we want to create a multiplayer space game where the players live in a simulated solar system. Solar system means large distances to cover, which raises the need for a huge map (most of it would be empty space, but it must exist).
According to this question from half a year ago, UE4 will support unlimited worlds by shifting the map origin. Is this feature available by now? If yes, in one of the answers there is mentioned that this method would not work in multiplayer (for obvious reasons). Is there a solution for this problem?
It is implemented now as World Composition. Here is the documentation for it:
Currently it does not work with multiplayer, but that is a limitation we are working on fixing. Creating MMOs with UE4 has been discussed by developers many times and even our CEO, Sweeney, has weighed in on how it can be done and how it has been done in the past with UE3:
This does indeed help, thanks for the information. A follow-up question: Is it possible to add levels of such a composed world programmatically during runtime? We would like to generate most of the worlds using a random generator.
That depends on what you are trying to accomplish.
You can load the same umap tile more than once at different location/rotation (which is what we do in our games), and you can spawn new actors or rearrange them.
The procedural content in the levels can be anything that you would like. However, you can’t make a .umap package and save it to disk in runtime code. So, if you make a procedural world and want to save it out, you have to make your own savegame or regenerate it from a seed number every run.