I am teaming up with a friend to make our first game.
Unreal engine 4 has so far really impressed us but we do still have a few doubts that hopefully someone here can take away.
We want to create a solar system with planets build from voxels.
These planets should be able to orbit the star and everything on the planets including the player should be able to move along smoothly with the planets.
This also means that gravity should be towards the planets core instead of just down so that player can walk around and objects will stay on the planet.
We also want the player to be able to move between the planets without switching levels. basically all planets should be in one world instead of working with different levels for each planet.
Basically everything is moving all the time. Is this possible or should everything be static?
There’s some big challenges there—first issue is size, there’s a level size limit in the engine, but it has tools to allow you to connect multiple maps together. Everything else will be more possible to do if you have a smaller size.
While there are engines created to do planet type stuff (like say No Man’s Sky) those are very specific and they usually lack a lot of other things.
I was afraid of that.
We don’t want to make the planets big, actually quite small, more like the size of the planets in spore.
One game that caught our attention is ‘‘planet cube’’, also made in unreal engine 4. game also uses voxel based planets moving in the solar system.
We where wondering if every side on the cube planet is a level, and the solar system is a skybox to give the illusion of the planet moving.
Or that perhaps everything is placed in one giant map. How do you think this is made?
It’s possible they might have scaled things down to get the size in, physics aren’t an issue there since nothing is really happening with physics, and it has some kind of dynamic voxelization of a mesh or something based off distance.
I would suggest using an actual voxel engine. For what you are making that would be better. Less system req, bigger spaces. If you do that, I suggest doing it in a software renderer. It will actually look better if you are going for an 8-bit look to the game. Personally I would suggest something smaller for you’re game, a game that big is quite a feat even for a larger studio. (P.S. you will need a coder for a game like this! No matter which way you go, For something like this you will most likely need a coder!)
Thats ok, We are willing to learn how to code. (I have some experience with java).
the game I linked looks indeed really impressive but we really want to keep it much smaller and much more simpler.
We only want to generate one solar system with about 5 or 6 planets that can hopefully fit into one map.
So we dont need infinite procedural terrain generation like for example minecraft has.
So You want you’re universe to be Kinda like the size of Kerbal Space program? Also Minecraft is rendered as polygons. And Voxel engines don’t just generate infinitly. They can work just like unreal. Why I suggested it was because they run so smooth on mid-low end computers. And can have HUGE areas of play! Check out Ken silverman’s Voxlap to see a small voxel engine in action!
EDIT: Also I don’t think minecraft is infinitly generated. That would overtax even the best of computers! Also you should plan on learning C++ for unreal 4!
It is infinitely generated, but not all at once. It generates the world in chunks. The more you explore, more data is required to store those chunks. This can result in large save files. Also, unless you’re using a chunk loader mod with the game, only so many chunks are loaded and active at any given time. For servers that do run chunk loaders, it does get taxing. I’ve seen some beastly machines that run servers start to cough and stutter because of too many chunks being loaded at one time.