Large worlds, landscape size limits, multiple landscapes

Development World Creation
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1

Hello world,

If I want to create a landscape (actor) that is 32x32 km = 1024 km2, or bigger, how do I do this? Any tips would be greatly appreciated. Or any other way to create a world with a landmass of this size.

UE5 talks about 88 Mkm distance from origo, or rather 88 Gm, but with landscapes? How?

New to Unreal I’m looking for tutorials on open world creation, but none of them seem to be about large worlds. I plan to make an RPG of sorts with more RTS-like camera, with the possibilty to accelerate time, so a large world is a must.

With New landscape, I can create 8x8 km = 64 km2; I can set a scale of the landscape, and I did double the scale (x, y = 200, 200) to make 16x16 km but then at half resolution (m/vert), which is fine for me. That’s decent size.

I can import heightmaps to increase this size, but not 32x32 km, only if I have 256 GB RAM, I have 64 GB, and 24 GB VRAM, I have 8 GB.

Or I could ditch landscapes and use meshes, and relying on nanite. But I guess I would lose out on landscape functionality (first off foliage on static meshes seem a bit off, compared to use on landscapes, collisions are not right so meshes are not placed on top of the mesh).

Or make some kind of zoned levels, with one landscape in each, but that seems to defeat the purpose of World partitioning.

In Unity I can create a set of, for example, 8x8 Terrains @ 8x8 km each, making 1024 km2 (max heightmap resolution seems to be 4096 px, so 2 m/vertex), but no built-in World partitioning in Unity, so I guess I have to make a quad tree solution of sorts. So I look to Unreal 5.

2

This is something I am looking in to at the moment.

Previously (in UE4) I have been able to import huuuge maps. 85x85km square maps. For whatever reason. I cannot do the same in UE5. It seems to be limited by the ram. Which makes sense.

But in UE4, I could load so much at a time. In UE5, it seems to force load everything. So I can’t even get past the import stage.

Anyway, to answer your question. Yes, you can import landscape tiles exported from something like world machine. When importing, just select tile 0,0 and it should grab the rest automatically.

3

Thanks for the reply! I have almost given up on UE5, so I didn’t check back here for a while.

So I do need a world gen app. I have World Machine Basic etc, but seems limited regarding export options. Maybe I have to get an upgraded version. Another hurdle for my UE5 switch having to buy a program just to test this.

The RAM requirements are a bit strange, since the World Partitioning system exists – one would think that could help with that problem. (I can hardly find any motherboards that can even have 256 GB RAM).

I’ve not dropped UE5 complete yet, though I have gone back to Unity for my project for now, still exploring all the solutions I need.

(Maybe Nanite landscapes could solve the problem, though I don’t see that mattering for this, maybe only making it worse…)