From what I’ve been able to gather so far from one Unreal Engine youtube video, Apollo island uses a 10 x 10 tile grid, though it is difficult to find any official information about what tile sizes they used, which is a shame as it’s always good to have an example of how to get landscape scale/sizes done well in this kind of project. A lot of people seem to be guestimating, but does anyone know if Epic themselves have stated the sizes?
I don’t think they use tiles at all
components can load/unload just the same.
Either way, tile size doesn’t matter. What matters is how many tris are in your lod0 components because you can potentially Activete 4 components at once and cause a x4 load stress on the system via near useless increase of tris count.
if to that you add tessellation (even distance based) you’ll have several areas with sub 1cm quads being subdivided - causing floating point stress on calculations for absolutely no good reason (other than someone decided the landscape mip system was supposed to work that way).
Depending what you have in the scene, pick a tile size that’s comfortable enough to allow you to work (8km for 100km^2+ is a must) and live with the limitation and having to balance LOD 0 out for performance.
Hi, I’d assumed they were using their own landscape and world composition tool for a base landscape layer and then adding static mesh components on afterwards like rocks and cliff edges etc,for more detail. Are you saying you believe it to be a single large landscape e.g 8029 x 8029?
The island itself is probably just about that size since you can easily cover it at 88kph on a vehicle in around 5 to 6m.
Also, they are using the new tools like the single layer water / spline and landmass plugin. Those don’t play well with world composition.
There are no cliffs at all in the game, and the landscape lighting is a mess.
You can see their base LOD is set to 1m between verticis on several areas of the map (last season at least).
The overall world size is bigger than 1 map.
nothing prevents you from creating several maps within the same level and placing them (the islands at the edges) where you want them to be. Those areas aren’t accessible and are probably baked out meshes.
Most notably, there is no floating point precision issues or a need to use world composition on such a small map, so if you don’t need it, because of the multi-player nature and having to keep sync with the server, you wouldn’t use it.
Mind you, I could be dead wrong, but I seriously doubt they have any need to use world composition tiles for Battle Royale.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3tTbVNkuwA&t=201s
Building Worlds in ‘Fortnite’ With Unreal Engine
At 33:17 Ryan Brucks talks about Grid-based editing, a new tool that partitions the world into a grid. He says Grid-based editing will ensure actors get placed into the right sub level. The tool isn’t released yet, but he does go on to say that you can achieve similar results with the world composition tool and it’s tiled import feature to help create a grid.
What you say makes a lot of sense. It’s with him talking about grids,sublevels, and world composition that led me to infer that world composition had been what they had previously used. Perhaps you are right though, maybe he is just saying that ‘if’ you wanted that grid based functionality and sublevels like they ‘currently’ use then world composition would give you that, but neglects to point out the can of worms opened by doing so.
It would be good to read your interpretation of what he said if you’re willing to have a peep at that part of the video.
Because of the part you linked alone, showing us RVT it becomes evident they don’t use world composition the same way as we have it avaliable. Or else applying rvt to the landscape would be a nightmare and require a different render capture for each tile.
having tried to do this (and yes on heavy shaders you do get the benefit on performpermance) I can tell you it’s no fun. Especially when the engine e crashes as much as it did back then.
As he’s making the river you can also see the whole island.
could still be loaded tiles, he never selects the landscape object.
The water bodies debug gives you another shot where the whole map seems to be a single object.
the grid part itself is a new thing - I would wager that it repartitions the landscape (the sizes are about as big as components would be for an 8k map) by isolating the component and managing its LOD level via quad tree.
we don’t have any info on that yet, and I don’t even think the water system has fully made it into .26 as showcased here.
either way, the amount of grid tiles would mean that at a base level you have a1 to j10 100 drawcalls for each tile of you were to mimic the landscape into world composition.
thats 100 levels, and 100 mesh impostors to play with.
For an 8km map its very much overkill.
it would be nice to see how the tool actually works in practice… perhaps it would make world composition obsolete in a nice way. I somewhat doubt it.