Cashgen - (kinda) Infinite Procedural World Generator

[mid_gen]

@Comniverse_01;558278

First off, wow awesome work. This is way beyond anything that I could do. I’ll have to subscribe or follow, whichever.

I had a few questions about integration with other editor features.

1. Will this work with the existing Landscape tools already in the editor once you have completed the project. I’m interested in making a game world where the player start area will be a pre-generated map that is the same no matter what server you play on. This will be a large extinct caldera, containing some large forests, a town village, abandoned castle, etc. Once you get outside the caldera however, I would like to have the world randomly generate from there. This will continue until the world size reaches a data size limit, and then the world will try to loop so that you get a simile of a planet where you can walk all the way around.
   So could you feasible have the pre-generated caldera and then stitch it into the random map?

2. Are you planning on extending the biome generation function any farther than trees and plants, or is that as far as it will go? I could see this as a open world game generator package, where a designer could input a bunch of parameters, add some characters, NPCs, and quests, and have themselves a simple game in a massive world.

3. Will the world support terrain editing at runtime, such that you can dig holes like in Minecraft? ( I know, I used the M word. It’s really the only game I know of where you can do that.)

4. Is the water swim-able, or could it be implemented, such that the program generates a physics volume underneath the water as well as a post process volume to simulate water ?

5. How big can this world conceivably be, and can it be saved, so that a player could explore a large map and then return to a previous area and have it the same as the last time he was there?

I know it’s a lot of work, I just wanted to know if you have any plans for implementing this kind of stuff or not.

Thanks and keep up the great work.

1. Nope. The Landscape tools are designed for editor use, I’ve not looked into it much but I read enough to know that using Landscape features at runtime was not going to be fun.

2. Easy enough to add another weightmap for actors, in addition to the instanced mesh spawning!

3. It’s heightmap based, so no overhangs or caves. There’s no reason why you couldn’t deform the underlying heightmap and refresh the mesh in realtime but it’s not really set up for that, would need quite a bit of refactoring and optimisation to make it work well.

4. I think OceanPlugin has various tools for this, I’m already using the Ocean actor so imagine it would be pretty easy to make it swimmable.

5. It’s currently restricted to the 20kmx20km UE level limit…but as soon as I get the world origin rebasing in, it’s theoretically infinite. The terrain is deterministic so it will always be the same whenever the player goes back to it, but anything the player interacts with? You’d need to take care of persisting those changes out somewhere.

I’m mega busy and juggling a few other projects at the moment so unlikely to be working on this in the next few weeks. If anyone wants to have a crack at world origin rebasing, go fork it on github