Okay, So I am playing around in World Machine and I have a large heightmap that I am working on. However, the overall size of this heightmap is 140kmx140km but I was told that UE4 supports a map size of 20kmx20km. Now is this the entire map, overall? Or each tile? Because I am exporting tiles from world machine and using the ‘World Composition’ feature in UE4. 20kmx20km is kind of small in my opinion. You think about it, 20kmx20km is only 12 miles. No full map size is that small without being a simple island or something. I have a heightmap that has small islands, 1 large island, and several medium size islands. Between all of them it’s basically a continent with some islands around it. No continent is 12 miles long by 12 miles wide. Thats barely an island. So if this truly is the cap on map size, I feel shorted on space when it comes to maps. Any suggestions? ( I am trying to use real world scaling for everything. (Buildings, islands, cars, etc.) If this is a bad idea then please tell me now)
World composition is what you can use to make worlds larger than 20km. The issue in games is that the size is limited since numbers get very large after a distance and it becomes too much information to handle so it has to find a way around it.
I do hope you know that with a scale that large, and realistic like you said, it would take a player 10 hours to walk from one end to the other. With a landscape that large, you are looking at hundreds of GBs of content if it is a high-res landscape without creating complex algorithms to pack & unpack the landscape.
No, no, no. I am not using the entire 140km. I am creating my landscape in world machine and then exporting the essential parts of the map that I Intend to use for the game. My overall map size would be about 30kmx30km and yes I understand that it would take the players a long time to go from place to place that is the purpose of a large scale map. That is why I would have teleport abilities and transportation vehicles such as cars or horses. Or maybe even flying mounts such as gryphons or air planes. The thing is, I just needed to know whether or not the engine can exceed 20km.
The engine can exceed it just fine, it’s just that after 20km, things become unstable/innacurate, such as physics, floating point values, and you may run into some other problems as well.