That video is what I’m trying to accomplish. I do think need real size earth to scale, I just also don’t want a mini world. That world in that video looks large enough to me personally.
In my opinion a whole Earth-sized planet would be boring. You clearly won’t have the resources to populate it with anything interesting without making vast spaces with nothing happening on them. You would have to use procedurals to do everything, topography, landscape materials, foliage, buildings, wildlife… and that would be No Man’s Sky again. Even if you pick some spots to manually introduce cool content all the other areas would just be a long bus ride to Disneyland.
What I would do is a planet wide view from space and as you approach the planet you would be given a choice as to which area (levels) you would like to go. These areas would be still have to be a large size to achieve what you want but they would still be a whole lot smaller than a planet. The transition from space to ground-level and between areas would not be seamless but I think (and it is just my opinion) this would make a much more interesting game.
From a technical point of view I would add that there are estimates that Google Earth’s database (just current satellite/aerial views) is 180 Tb. If you add the 3d information (terrain basically) that would go over over 1000 Tb. Of course working with procedurals would greatly reduce that but you would also like to introduce lots of variation to keep things from getting repetitive, so I imagine the technical challenges are immense.
Planet Gravity can be implemented nicely by modifying CharachterMovementComponent,and there are dozens of methods for you to override.
Planet mesh?Maybe generating some procedural mesh is ok.
But we can always start with static mesh to give us some confidence.
Then, try some voxel plugin or just planet-lod algorithm to build your planet.
My test:
https://youtu.be/cBlZWSHDaE4
just wait for 4.26 https://youtu.be/SeNM9zBPLCA that will help. but i’m not sure how they did the planet itself.