Well not infinite, but mind blowingly big, or so sources say…
The following info has been taken from star citizen & cryengine forums:
“This change is what would allow a map to be the size of a small solar system (1/4 size of ours).”
“CR said that with current CryEngine they can only go 8 km out before there’s issues.” Unreal is now 20 km (for multiplayer)
“It will be exponentially bigger. The maps at the moment are like a single drop of water compared to the ocean that will be unleashed with 64bit.”
“Double precision will get about a maximum of 4,294,967,296 times larger in each coordinate direction (X,Y,Z etc.) - That’s if I did my sums right - although that would have quite some precision loss so they’d be likely to come in from that figure a bit to leave some padding for precision calculations.”
I looked up what developers here had to say about it on answerhub:
https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/56053/double-precision-support-in-ue4.html
“GPUs don’t have universal support for them, so even if all your CPU work was in doubles, at some point everything would need to return to floats to head to the GPU.”
It seems not possible, but yet it is possible, because on several developer videos for star citizen they are in fact saying they will be able to get these mind blowingly large numbers of playable multiplayer space with 64bit double precision (which is suposed to be completed anytime now)
Would UE4 ever be able to achieve this as well?
Are we almost upon the the next generation of gaming with such vast distances?
Sure single player games have origin rebasing/shifting and multiplayer games have interconnected zones with longer loading times, its sort of been done, but not in this way, such a vast amount of space in an online seamless world makes me drool