I’m building an open world level using World Partitions.
I’ve added quite a bit of content to the level at this point.
However, when I try to play the game, a particular partition is taking so long to load that normal gameplay is not possible.
There are about 2000 Actors in that partition, and it takes over 15 seconds to load. Since it is asynchronous loading, the game is playing but the late loaded Actors are popping in while the character is running towards that partition.
I did some experimentation to try to fix this, and came up with some surprising results.
It seemed that the sheer number of Actors in that partition, rather than the amount of resources or complexity of assets in that partition, was causing the large delay.
Combining the 2000 Actors that were in the area into a single Packed Level Actor made the partition load much faster. (Of course, this shouldn’t actually be the case. Each of these Actors is designed to interact with the player. I just did it for the sake of experimentation.)
Conversely, if I placed 2000 of the engine’s default shape cubes with no functionality into a particular partition, loading that partition was very slow.
It seems a bit odd that the sheer number of Actors present in that partition would cause such a large bottleneck in partition loading.
This is because we typically expect that a given partition in an open world can have hundreds or thousands of Actors.
But is this density of open worlds something that Unreal Engine can’t handle in general? Or do I need to tweak some settings for performance? Any help would be appreciated.