Hey guys, quick question about level streaming / world composition:
How would you go about showing distant landscape (such as a large mountain) from a large distance away, a distance far enough from the mountain that the level is not showing? I don’t like the idea of a large mountain suddenly popping into view when you get close enough, and was wondering what the recommended way of getting effect would be.
I have thought of trying to use a set of billboards with a captured image of the view from a distance, placing it on the edge of the landscape currently being displayed, then setting it to be invisible once the level is streamed in, but I don’t think that it will look very convincing.
Would it be better to place a low poly version of the mountain in the same location and then hide it when that level is streamed in? Or is there a simpler way of doing ? I will be using the usual techniques to avoid long sight-lines using varying terrain, but cannot fully avoid .
I actually thought about too when i was playing around with world composition a couple of months ago and all i could think of is having low poly version of visibly large parts of the next map like you said. becomes less of a concern if every tile is 8k since the transition distance grows, but working with 8k landscapes isnt so easy either, so… :\
Yeah I think the low poly meshes will be best, trying to keep each tile as small as possible at the moment, 2k max per tile to try and get the most out of the performance gains. I guess is the trade-off between large landscapes and smaller tiles…
You might also experiment with adding the truly distant landmarks/mountains right to your skybox (which means having a custom skybox for each map), and then perhaps use the lower poly meshes for landmarks/mountains which are slightly closer.
Have fun, and share some pictures when you get it worked out!
I was also debating whether to take approach as well, it may have similar issues to using a billboard, but I might give it a try. I was thinking of creating a second inner sphere, or a curved plane (half a cylinder without the top/bottom), similar to the way epic made the Blueprint Office example, by using a alpha masked texture for a city in the distance. Then once the player got close enough remove the texture. Only difficulty with it would be ensuring that when the landscape pops-in, the image lines up exactly where the mountain is, depending on where the player is in the level could be an. Also going from a flat image to a mesh might be to noticeable, but I will experiment with it.
Not sure which will work out in the end, but thank you for the suggestions!
