I have a city on a landscape. This landscape ends at one point, and the user can walk/fly to the edge of it.
Typically I have seen games have mountains or ocean, plus an invisible wall to justify the limit of navigation, but my landscape is a piece of a huge plains landscape.
I have tried with a height fog but I can’t seem to create the “tube” shape of it, where the center is clear and the edges are thicker and thicker the more you move away from the center.
How can limit my world? If you want a real example, think Black & White where they limit it through oceans. Skyrim limits the user with mountains. Fallout 3 uses piles of garbage, wreckage and also mountains.
You could use a giant hollow box mesh for your invisible wall. It is what I use to keep the player hemmed in above the map.
For the fog or other obstruction, a lot of games with cities use some kind of wall of buildings to block off the outside world. You could probably use anything that fits your world, perhaps even painting distant landscape decals on the inside of your collision box.
Besides visual cues to obstruction (and tall collision volumes), you can have areas of increasing damage, so long as it doesn’t confuse the player. It is a good idea to mix it up, so you don’t just have a cliff going all the way around the level. Disperse rocks, cliffs, buildings, dense trees, massive fallen trees, actual dangerous traps, acid lakes.
If you are flying, maybe add high winds or storms that down your aircraft after a certain time going beyond the set limit. Firefall uses “The Melding” … a pretty contrived idea but it fits into their story.
I remember Bionic Commando used radiation as a boundary device. I guess lots of games do.
You can build scenery beyond the boundary that you can see but not reach. You can now use Sprite Imposters to build efficient mesh replacements (a nice video on this is on Unreal Engine ). It’s a new engine feature.
Somes games cue the player to the out of reach-ness of such areas using increased focal blur (post process volume), so you know it’s out of bounds.
Thank you for your answer. I am trying to avoid invisible wall because its very frustrating for the player to be limited without solid justification. Thus the fog of war.
I like your idea for weather effects. The player has an “avatar” which is a body-less, identity-less observer that represents the city’s ability to perceive its immediate surroundings. This ability is limited (by telescopes, radar, explorer reports, etc.) and I want to somehow reflect this without ■■■■■■■ off the player.
In that case just use a light source that only illuminates your city and by the time everything goes black they hit your invisible wall and turn around.
the light source is daylight, but you may have something there. the further the player goes, the darker or fuzzier the screen gets. I could simulate either regardless of the scene (alpha + solid color screen).
I think a collaboration of both fog of war and weather effects would be a good mix for this, . If you are attempting to limit the players scope due to radar, telescope, etc. It would only be logical that the areas they cannot physically see are “dark”. Using physical obstructions when necessary will allow you to create some variation without it feeling too out of place.
If you want a real example, think Black & White where they limit it through oceans. Skyrim limits the user with mountains. Fallout 3 uses piles of garbage, wreckage and also mountains.