Large worlds in Unreal

General Feedback & Requests
1

Hey Epic,
So after about a year of using Unreal engine 4 for open world projects. I have the following feedback to give.

  1. A real time GI solution is really needed. Just due to the fact that baking light mass takes a very long time on really large maps.
  2. Expanding on the Foliage painting tools would be beneficial to help with smaller to mid sized levels that do not use the procedural foliage toolset.
    Example: Adding a lasso area selection followed up flood filling the selection with foliage for example.
  3. Expanding on the spline tools such as adding a river tool and road tool that works with the foliage tools.
    Example: Lay down a road or river segment that takes away foliage on the terrain that is overlapping with the segment.
  4. Being able to Lasso select an area and paint materials on the terrain using a flood fill option in the selection would be beneficial as well.
  5. A “raise to” tool would be beneficial as well. It would allow much more precision and accuracy when sculpting terrain.
  6. Being able to branch off a spline from another spline would be very helpful. Especially When making complex things like roads, Rivers, etc.

I have included a video to give some examples of what I mean with #2, #3, and 4.

Thank you for your time,

HeadClot

2

I second that. Especially a ‘smart’ foliage tool would be great.

3

This can be done already with a little bit of setup. No code magic. Just a handfull of BP nodes. I see if I can make a short example later today :slight_smile:

4

Would be nice to see some example stuff. Made an open world game and it’s just unplayable and it’s optimized :frowning:

5

Had it almost working, then ran out of time. Need to tweak my approach to avoid some array caveats…
Tomorrow evening, I think I can finish it.

6

I have a very large world in my game (16km x 16km), and if you can port to 4.14 the load times and fps seem to have increased A LOT.

my game in 4.12 vs 4.14 is night and day for loading times and fps in game (2+ minutes load time vs ~20 seconds) because of EDL i believe.

try opening your project in 4.14, open project settings and under streaming enable “Event Driven Loader Enabled”. (only works in cooked builds)
if your game is already cooked in 4.14 open your cooked folder, game/config and change defaultengine.ini to enable this feature and watch the load times
and weep happy tears.

7

Well i’m a bit scared of moving my project to 4.14 because I know how buggy 4.14 atm is. I’m working on some new marketplace stuff and it’s not fun to work with 4.14. I think ill wait for the next hotfix and then try it out with 4.14 if it increases the performance in my main project. I will post my results :wink:

8

Don’t overwrite your project!!! haha, make a copy and convert that incase it blows up.