I’m trying to make a game that can simulate large naval battles. I want to be able to have worlds a few hundred nautical miles across (1 nautical mile is ~1.8km). While it would be tedious to have a ship travel that distance in one game, Harpoon anti-ship missiles can travel around 67nm and I want to have the option to set up scenarios where ships are in a standoff.
Using UE4’s built-in physics would probably be easier if I can make it work, but I suspect I’m going to run into issues. It seems like the typical way to use large worlds is to rebase the origin around the player, but the assumption that makes that work is that you don’t need to simulate everything at once, which isn’t true for my project. Missiles launched across the map need to be simulated in one way or another, since they are still threats.
I know UE4 wasn’t designed with this in mind, but I’m wondering if and how I can achieve good results.
The only idea I have is to change the scale from centimeters to meters. I don’t need to anything very small or complex. I don’t think I’m going to have much in the way of collisions, and typically all I need to know about a collision is that it happened, not the results, because one or more of the bodies colliding is going to explode almost without exception. Intuitively, changing the scale from centimeters to meters would result in 100 times less accuracy, but is that really a problem?
Could somebody with more experience give me some advice?