Earth?

Development World Creation
1

Ok, update! LOL. I have all my tools and have a game wrote out…Im going to make all the Chars,props, Ect…But…I just realized I have a HUGE problem…I need a open world layout but with a 1:1 scale of earth…No space or other planets…Just Earth…

I have tried my best to read up on this so I got World Machine but not sure thats the right tool or is it? Its going to be a NIGHTMARE if I have to custom sculpt each mile of the EARTH…Am I going to have to do that OR is there a easier way?

2

You don’t need a 1:1 clone of the whole earth.

3

why do you say that?

4

I’ve been theorizing for a while now on a google earth plugin nothing to show but maybe you should look in to that, it might be worthwhile.

5

You want to make Earth, 1:1 scale, in Unreal?

What will the gameplay consist of?

6

lazy Games, You know the game 7 days to die and The Forest? Its KINDA like those, Just more real based…I can do it but cant figure out how Google Earth my Land LOL as SaxonRah said…I WISH there was a plugin :frowning:

7

If you want a big open world environment, thats fine. Recreating the entire Earth is an unrealistic expectation, especially for a single person.

8

Does the 1:1 include being a sphere or can it be on a plane?

9

Thanks for the reply’s guys…

10

Sphere is what I need but dont know how to do that either.

11

This would take a TON of time but you could always do this https://forums.epicgames.com/threads/607176-Tutorial-Importing-Detailed-Terrain-from-Google-Earth and then put it together like a puzzle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUx8vLosDLY&feature=youtu.be There are some tutorials out there with taking google map and making a Height map that look pretty good :slight_smile: I wish you the best!

12

You have a super appropriate name, if you want to recreate Earth :smiley:
Btw, Earth is not a sphere, Earth is a geoid.
And I recommend you to make something less ambitious if you don’t know how to create sphere o.o

13

Whenever someone comes up with this “endless world” idea i can’t help but wonder how many life times they have to actually fill that world…

In any case, you can get the height map of the US in sections from here:

http://srtm.csi.cgiar.org/SELECTION/inputCoord.asp

It takes some time to download but you get a 6k heightmap for each 400km x 400km section.

14

earth009.gif

It can sure make you head spin…But with any game idea you need to think about it, write down your thoughts, drink some coffee, sleep on it think on it, and rewrite it until you feel you can accomplish it or it has reasonable goals. Then break it down and start one piece at a time. :slight_smile: GL

15

Given that you’re just starting out, you need to spend some time learning some things and then you’ll have a better idea of what’s reasonable.

16

I built a full Earth scene graph for a virtual world and military training purposes a while back.

It is very hard, and it is a LOT of data. The earth is HUGE. Also, the graphics cards and physics engines for games typically use 32-bit floating point values, which have an error of about 1.5 meters at the surface of the earth if you stay with the origin as the center of the earth. Thus, you need to translate all your data to be camera-centric or close-to-camera-centric, and keep all the actual (authoritative) data in 64-bit floating point.

If you want gameplay on Earth, you’re faced with at least two problems:

  1. It’s a lot of data to model. Even if you import it from satellite imagery (a la Google Earth,) it’s really messy data, and you won’t be getting good vegetation and buildings from a ground perspective. You’ll see shadows painted straight into the ground texture, etc. It’s a mess.
  2. It would take a normal person many thousands of years to walk/travel to all places on Earth. Meanwhile, you may be aiming for a hundred hours of gameplay.