I’m very new and not sure if these things are possible (and if this is the right subforum):
My aim is the generate a high quality version of my game (which has different graphics detail settings) and then extract lower quality versions with reduced content/file size.
E.g.:
strip 1 or 2 highest mipmap levels away from textures
remove high quality materials from build
remove highest quality meshes of the LOD versions from build
or generally remove high quality version for everything there is LOD available (e.g. also blueprints or custom stuff)
Is this already possible or do I have to code such things myself?
Can I control which mipmap level a material uses? So to create a low quality material that uses level 2 as level 1? (that I then would have to adapt automatically on stripping old level 1, doh)
Is there some global “LOD manager”, e.g. to have all kind of LOD (blueprints, materials, particles, meshes, terrains, custom stuff) centrally controlled?
Is automatic LOD generation supported (without paying for Simplygon)? Does UE4 support progressive mesh technology or is there a plan for it? If not, anybody in the community working on implementing that (e.g. copying this: [GSoC 2013 - accepted] Improve Progressive Mesh - Ogre Forums )?
You don’t have to strip anything out, there’s settings that can control how all of that works so that on a low-end system it can use lower-resolution textures and meshes. The only things you would have to code would be things that might be unique to your game that the engine couldn’t anticipate.
There’s not an automatic LOD system, you have to create your own LOD’s and import them for the mesh. For meshes that you’re using tessellation on it can be controlled as far as how far it subdivides a mesh.
For me it is about download size. So the high quality version has settings from very low to very high. But I want to provide smaller downloads with e.g. just very low and low. Or only very low for mobile phones. Or one fixed setting for consoles (not that I’m developing for consoles).
E.g. ShooterGame has 1.2GB content, I would like to deploy a smaller version that just contains the low setting resources for the people that have slow machines and know it. (Not sure if it makes a difference with ShooterGame, but for many real games it would)
There’s definitely not anything there that would do that automatically. You would have to make some kind of tool that could automatically go through and set the maximum resolutions lower and set the default LOD’s and stuff like that. Alternately, you could target a low-end system with low textures and stuff and then offer a high resolution texture pack, which would be easier to do than building multiple versions. You would just have those assets and then have it patched to change the options settings of the game so that it knows it can go to those resolutions.