How would I go about a large city?

Development Asset Creation
1

Hi all,

So I am trying to design a medieval city on a landscape. I have exactly how the landscape will look within one level. I was wondering how would I go about creating the city within it?

  • Would I stream each city section into the main landscape level?
  • Would I have to stream the landscape into the separate levels?
    I remember in the original UDK there was the level streaming where there was one main map and then you had the separate maps that streamed into it. Does UE4’s level streaming work the same way?

Thanks

2

I wish I knew how to set up all the level streaming but I don’t know have the knowledge on how to set up level streaming optimization in Unreal Engine. I don’t know yet how to make a main world map either but I do have a mini map. i just know that in putting a small city sized map with a couple of regions around it in UE4 I’ve already run into optimization trouble when turning around the camera in the editor… Laggy Slow freezing camera and Frame Rates, and also with the UNDO in landscape mode takes forever for Unreal to execute, I had to wait over half an hour for it to undo a small
little hill that I sculptured in the landscape. So there’s serious lag issues going on with this engine because I don’t know how to optimize it.

3

Hi Falthar,

I would look into two things:

Hierarchical Instanced Static Meshes - Instead of laying down your buildings as separate static meshes, create a few empty actors with the HISM component and load the same types of buildings into one actor each. So say, you have 10 types of buildings and they repeat. Create 10 different actors with HISM components and add as many copies of the same building as needed. This will give you HUGE savings in performance and it also has the option of culling meshes based on distance.

Level Streaming - Like Tozan mentioned. If you have a huge landscape / world, you want to set up level streaming so you dynamically load parts of your level during runtime. Its very easy to set up but it requires planning from the beginning. Go to Youtube and search for Level Streaming tutorials and plan your level with this in mind from the beginning.

So, in short, create level chunks that are loaded via level streaming and inside each chunk use HISM to display any repeating building / actor.

Hope this helps!

4

This looks like what I needed! Thanks for the help!