on my ongoing way to find somthing i could do with ue4, i today saw a video off a realy simple board game (Dicewars) and thought ok this is fun and has realy simple rules
perfect for the first project.
So i created a simple hexagon mesh in freecat and exported it to .obj then with blender to .fbx works create.
Ok now i am in UE4 and thing don’t go like i want it.
How should i go and create the board i tried to make a actor BP and built a first test board with all hex fields visible just to see if it works.
Ok it works but lets say i have 5 player each has 16 small lands each land has 8 hex fields so i have 5168 = 640 and to get a little room *2 so have just 1280 meshes in one actor.
If i now create this in BP it takes 1-2 min to compile or even change somthing in the BP.
Also because you are creating those meshes dynamically (for game they all are dynamic) change their materials to unlit, turn off shadow casting.
Yes such stuff will force your game into borderlands, wow, wildstar, starcraft etc cartoony artstyle. That is real reason behind all that stuff, shaders for that style are much cheaper than those artvis ones esp with dynamic content.
So my bet is on shadows and dynamic lighting for those meshes. Second is “instanced” vs “static mesh”.
You probably cannot do this with shadows (unless you dig deep and optimize shadows on those meshes). Materials can probably be normal lit ones, but again you need first make them unlit (to see limits and how much lighting actually costs you) then improve quality step by step, optimizing everything you can on the way.
Btw. that lighting problem is biggest reason i may give up on dynamically created worlds for now. Its matter of what is better: great shaders (and look) that unreal can do vs dynamically created map. So far dynamically created maps compared to how static level looks, lose badly.
