Large Tilemaps in Paper2D

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

Hi All,

I’m planning to make a top-down, 2D, multiplayer game. I know that support for Paper 2D has been spotty over the years… I picked Unreal because reviews indicate that its multiplayer support is superior to Unity, it has native support for the Steamworks API, and the rest of the engines listed as having native Steamworks support here are either too costly, too complicated, or their community is unappealing to me. (You guys look awesome from a distance).

I’ve got a degree and a few years of experience doing low level programming with C++, and I’ve made a few simple graphical applications using SDL. I have a basic understanding of performance considerations for game design.

I want my game to mostly take place on a large overworld map (like, something on the order of 4000x2500 tiles). I’m still working on my sprite set, but in the meantime, I hope to save some time by asking you guys these questions:

Are there any size limitations in Unreal’s tilemap builder? All the reference material I’ve found online use small maps for examples, and I don’t see this particular question addressed anywhere. I’m sure Unreal won’t waste resources rendering offscreen stuff, but is there anything else I should be aware of when making a big overworld map? Would it be a bad idea for some reason if I wanted to just build the whole thing in one “level”, or is there a technical limitation requiring me to space it out over multiple levels? Lastly, can you guys give me any tips for optimization? For example, does Unreal add anything to tilemaps by default which I should remove and rewrite in a more specialized way in order to get good performance on a larger map?

Thanks everybody!

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Your going to want to make a few tilemaps, not just one single large one. you can load an extra map when characters overlap with some trigger or something. when one map is spawned in another when noone is can be spawned out. i think your limitation is going to be mostly dependent on your tile sizes and capabilities of your servers/clients. I can’t sorry if it’s a technical limitation that will stop you from building the whole map, but i think a sectioned approach will be easier to manage and build up. with some fancy coding you could even get it to be procedurally generated or at least with some random elements. I’m planning to take a sectioned approach myself, 1. easier to manage, 2. source controlled out other maps for others to make 3. easier to scrape a map and start over vs all of it.

tilemap max width and height is 1024, that’s how many tiles you can have. The pixel count can be selected to an unreasonable and probably unuseable level. 30930… O.o
So an example would be 16x16, that’ll be 16x1024 16,384x16,384. That’s a big map… I don’t think UE will render that map off screen but i’m pretty sure it’s loaded into memory and will be taking up space and cpu if something is scripted there, someone smarter than me would have to confirm that though.

lastly tilemaps are broken right now (early access rather), go to this ticket and give it a vote to get the lighting fixed for the tilemaps