Browsing the marketplace and even on Youtube, you find a lot more landscaping level designs than indoor stuff like dungeons or rooms etc. Is this just a preference or is there some reason?
What do you prefer to make? Indoor or outdoor? And why?
I think UE4 has the best interiors out of all engines. It’s on par with Fox Engine. However I’m not a big fan of UE4’s outdoor environements, mainly due to the lack of volumetric fog and lighting (and that unreal-ish look that doesn’t really do realistic outdoors justice but that’s just a matter of taste). But hey, we’re getting volumetric stuff in the next release, this will make landscapes look a hell of a lot better. 
You can’t put too much fancy stuff in the editor with this type of engine, it starts to get UNSTABLE… It crashes frequently if you have too many shaders, too many things going on in it or your textures are set too high that its trying to process all this stuff. So to add volumetric clouds like nebulas or clouds over detailed landscapes is gonna break the engine unless they find a way to make it more stable, the editor is not stable enough on my machine with 16 gigs of ram, the editor runs slow…
You also have to wait for its asset list to rebuild itself everytime that you delete an asset
so if you have 5,000 or so assets it might not take long to rebuild, maybe 5 minutes, but what is the game has 30,000 or more? You could be waiting an hour or longer. You can’t do nothing when its in this checking asset mode.
UE4 is very fast on my computer, ram is not everything that matters. What’s your GPU? CPU?
source please?
I have 16GB RAM and I am managing a pretty great looking fully dynamic open world, massive map scene filled with marketplace content.
Not sure you know what you’re fully doing. You shouldn’t discourage people like this if you yourself don’t know how to manage your project correctly.
Volumetric clouds kill the engine? What about TrueSky, which has already been packaged in AAA titles and runs better than UDS (a 2d sky system).
Well Infiltrator crashed after loading all the assets when it went into Compressing Streaming Textures mode and Shooter had Crashed during the loading of its assets and when I check the log I find out that these project demos have got certain texture and other files missing from their project directories.
And sometimes when firing up the engine and loading in my game map, the engine gets caught
up in an infinite load loop being stuck loading at 95% and when that happens, I have to shut down the editor and reboot the engine all over again and then it finally all loads my project all in… Does anyone know what is causing the engine to get stuck in these infinite load loops when loading in your projects sometimes?
As for making large landscapes with the editor TOOLS I didn’t think the editor is optimized enough for this yet. Now the stuff that you are buying and loading into the engine from the marketplace, those meshes I think are already been optimized for engine use, but the tools of the editor are not optimized. You still see holes when moving the camera around if you create the landscape with the landscape builder tools, but if you import in a landscape like from world builder, you can import a big landscapes with no hole drawing issues or slowdown. I came to the conclusion that the engine was optimized only for game use, not for the editor.
Volumetric clouds that look 3d?, like with Freelancer, with the nebulas that you could fly your ship all through. I haven’t seen Unreal Engine do this yet or seen a tutorial on creating those kind of 3d nebulas as my game is sci-fi and needs 3d nebulas for the space simulator map… But I’m convinced that all the volumetric cloud and other special effects stuff is only going to be useful in small scale stuff unless the editor can be optimized to do it on large scale areas.
Good question. I am able to load them, & play them without issues or even hang ups, and get around 30FPS w/ all PP and Bloom on. It is odd that you’re getting those issues. Even the Kite demo I can load and play. Although, it is very slow, it still loads up simulates/plays.
Not all are optimized, unfortunately. There is some work on some assets. And using instancing saves a hell of a lot of resources, culling and occlusion really help to. Also, not to make you mad or anything but I am also able to keep my texture streaming detail on “Cinematic” so all my textures are always streamed in and maintain fair performance.
TrueSky does it. “True” volumetric or not (they are volumetric by definition, I don’t know if game industry term volumetric is any different), you are able to fly through their clouds like an airplane. Check their videos. All this is done on a massive scale and runs very well on Mid-High spec.
Open world is a chore, that is a fact.
Purely for level design, I think the question is too polarising.
What level designers care about more is the functionality of the environment when using the game mechanics - only an art department is paid to care about art. Level designers build, engineers of the world are they. Art departments are the painters and decorators that go in afterwards, to make everything ‘look pretty’.
In terms of indoor versus outdoor…whatever pays the most at that particular moment in time (if freelance), followed by ‘I think that will be super-awesome boss!’ 
This is especially true when bonus time draws near…
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=truesky+ue4
For real though, Truesky is a great plugin that I would love to see incorporated in UE4 to provide a more dynamic and attractive sky system.
“Good question. I am able to load them, & play them without issues or even hang ups, and get around 30FPS w/ all PP and Bloom on. It is odd that you’re getting those issues. Even the Kite demo I can load and play. Although, it is very slow, it still loads up simulates/plays.” Cinematic, interesting.
I don’t think I can even run the kite demo, haven’t tried it yet.
I disabled Slow Motion on the engine because when I had slow motion checked, it was crashing the editor on firing up the engine on one of my own maps. Now the map loads in with no crash screen popping up before I could even do anything with the editor. I turned off slow motion through changing the setting in one of the engine’s ini files.
And I cannot set my engine settings up on stellar or high performance because when I start a new project under those settings it just crashes the engine. So my settings have to be on minimum. One of the annoying things about the engine is that it dosen’t always tell you the cause of the crash not until you go look at the log. But really the crash window should pop up with the log so you can see where the crashed started.
“Not all are optimized, unfortunately. There is some work on some assets. And using instancing saves a hell of a lot of resources, culling and occlusion really help to. Also, not to make you mad or anything but I am also able to keep my texture streaming detail on “Cinematic” so all my textures are always streamed in and maintain fair performance.”
So you’re using level streaming volumes? This to me sounds a bit like the special Portal brushes we used to use in Red editor so the engine wouldn’t try to render everything on the screen all at once or it would overload the engine and crash it. But that system worked best only in indoor maps or caves as you can’t have two portals facing each other otherwise you get the hall of mirrors effect.
Instancing saves? What’s this?
I havent set up the save system yet, as it will take alot of work to set it up because my game has
several thousands of variables to try to keep track of because of all the different systems so it would have to
be done in a data save table. But I haven’t seen a tutorial yet on how to set that up. I’ve only seen tutorials on setting up
these simple little save systems with just a few variables.
So this Truesky creates 3d cloud meshes that you can import into the engine?, not just draws 3d cloud background pictures?
because I liked what they did in Freelancer to create the nebula effects.
For my laptop, I use 16 GB of RAM and a GTX 970M and a 3 GHz Core i7, and it’s okay, but a too big scene does indeed start to chug.
For my desktop, I have 32 GB of RAM and a GTX 1080 and a 4 GHz Core i7, and it’s a lot better.
If I did a AAA Unreal game for a living, I’d use a dual-Xeon motherboard and 64 GB of RAM for everyone working on the project, plus an 8 GB RAM Intel Integrated machine to test on for min spec compliance :*)
“Good question. I am able to load them, & play them without issues or even hang ups, and get around 30FPS w/ all PP and Bloom on. It is odd that you’re getting those issues. Even the Kite demo I can load and play. Although, it is very slow, it still loads up simulates/plays.” Cinematic, interesting.
I don’t think I can even run the kite demo, haven’t tried it yet.
I disabled Slow Motion on the engine because when I had slow motion checked, it was crashing the editor on firing up the engine on one of my own maps. Now the map loads in with no crash screen popping up before I could even do anything with the editor. I turned off slow motion through changing the setting in one of the engine’s ini files.
And I cannot set my engine settings up on stellar or high performance because when I start a new project under those settings it just crashes the engine. So my settings have to be on minimum. One of the annoying things about the engine is that it dosen’t always tell you the cause of the crash not until you go look at the log. But really the crash window should pop up with the log so you can see where the crashed started.
“Not all are optimized, unfortunately. There is some work on some assets. And using instancing saves a hell of a lot of resources, culling and occlusion really help to. Also, not to make you mad or anything but I am also able to keep my texture streaming detail on “Cinematic” so all my textures are always streamed in and maintain fair performance.”
So you’re using level streaming volumes? This to me sounds a bit like the special Portal brushes we used to use in Red editor so the engine wouldn’t try to render everything on the screen all at once or it would overload the engine and crash it. But that system worked best only in indoor maps or caves as you can’t have two portals facing each other otherwise you get the hall of mirrors effect.
Instancing saves? What’s this?
I havent set up the save system yet, as it will take alot of work to set it up because my game has
several thousands of variables to try to keep track of because of all the different systems so it would have to
be done in a data save table. But I haven’t seen a tutorial yet on how to set that up. I’ve only seen tutorials on setting up
these simple little save systems with just a few variables.
So this Truesky creates 3d cloud meshes that you can import into the engine?, not just draws 3d cloud background pictures?
because I liked what they did in Freelancer to create the nebula effects.
I enjoy building interiors more. However, I find they’re more time consuming with being exact and hiding pieces to work here and there, etc.
I’m all about lighting and interiors are way more IMO.
Exteriors are great as well. I love “non-traditional” landscapes and adding atmospheres (rain, smoke, blowing leaves, floating embers, etc). And night versus day… Love the darkness.
Great thread! Thanks!
Oops!
**more fun IMO