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You are right about cartoonish textures being harder to do. However I think we can create a post process shader to make things look cartoonish. But I do understand that we need coordination between artists so that stuff look similar. Anoterh thing to note is with toon style, the lighting must change. ie instead of using the interpolated normals inside the Material, we should recalculate them based on dx and dy (whcih is doable in UE4). What this does is all faces that are in the same orientation receives the same amount of light which will give us a ‘blocky’ look.
However one advantage of toon shading is lower poly-count. Since blocky look is what we need, we can reduce mesh complexity a lot (espceially for buoldings, charcters and trees). I think even terrain can be less detailed.
About modular terrain:
I like the idea. However I have some concerns about parth-finding and other optmizations. As far as I know the navmesh is generated by the editor and not at runtime. Ofcourse the navmesh gets modified at runtime to accomodate for moving elements. But I think most of the time-consuming stuff is done from within the editor (youmight have seen the ‘buling nav mesh’ notifications). So if we allow the player to create maps (ie in-game), when do we generate the nav mesh? If there is such an option in UIE4 to generate navmesh at runtime and save it we are good. Otherwise we will need to come up with a dynamic navigation/pathfinding system of our-own (like did). However since our map will be on a grid, pathfinding will be much easier.
Another possible problem is terrain deformation. With the UE4 landscape this is easy. IE when we place a large building or structure, we can flatten the underlying terrain to match it. But with tiles, this is not possible (since they are static meshes).
So from what I know,
Pros:
- Faster level creation
- Better performance if we can use instancing
- We can let players create/modify maps
Cons:
- Navmesh???
- No terrain deformation possible
- Blocky appearance
- Less control over the landscape.