I’m currently working on a top-down open-world game. I’d like to use something similar to the cell-based design used by Bethesda Game Studios in their open world games, where the contents of adjacent cells load asynchronously as you move through the world. Where possible, I am trying to avoid loading screens to give the player a seamless game experience.
One benefit I see in using some scene-based mechanic is the ability to construct/modify the world using the Unreal Editor instead of relying on an outside editor for things such as terrain, etc.
Is this possible with Unreal 4? What recommendations would you have for making this work, or what are some alternatives I should look into?
In the landscape mode, the tooltip for the “Manage” tap says “Contains tools to add a new landscape, import/export landscape, add/remove components and manage streaming.” This leads me to believe that Unreal already has some functionality built in for streaming. I can see that it has parameters for what size the world chunks should be. Does Unreal do the streaming/detection for me, or is that something I have to facilitate myself?
Would it be feasible to construct the entire world in just one level, then?
EDIT: To clarify on what you said, it sounds like you’re suggesting it is possible to have “a game made of huge terrain” and streaming will be done entirely, and any supplemental content (interior levels, for example), I could stream in manually via Blueprint scripting.
Exactly. A good approach would be to have multiple cities or outposts for example which are streamed.
The benefit of using such a system is that multiple designers could work on different areas of the game without having to load or navigate through the entire world.