I’m new to Unreal Engine 5. I want to create a full-fledged planet on which the main gameplay will take place. The planet must be large enough to be circumnavigated and have gravity. How can I do it?
Hey there @BlendRusher! Welcome to the community! You can use this tutorial setup to make smaller planetoids akin to the Super Mario Galaxy series but this is not ideal for massive scales:
However if you’re talking about a 1:1 large scale planet, this answer gets quite a bit more complex, as UE isn’t really built with planets in mind, so you have to roll much of your own custom systems. The landscape system is built on a flat plane and not meant to be edited at runtime, the base character class isn’t meant to have a “down” in any direction other than -Z, and you’ll begin running into both software and hardware constraints quickly if you aren’t careful. To generate or simulate worlds of that scale you start getting into territory even dedicated space games like Elite Dangerous mostly fake as it’s not really feasible to be “full fledged” in most cases. Though if you’re up to the task I can give pointers in the direction some other’s have gone, but I’d need to know in detail what “full fledged” entails for your use case. In any case it will be a massive technical undertaking.
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I mean, you brought up the worse possible example of game making. The devs there can’t even make an FPS addition work half decently with massive funding and several years of dev time…
In short:
It’s very possible to make a 1:1 copy of earth work in chunks, but youd have to build your own custom engine off of anything which offers source, so even unreal, to support things correctly.
Doing things in more acceptable sizes is also possible - think No Man’s Sky - with the use of voxels.
Doing things with some sort of a repeating infinity is also possible, lets consider Minecraft on that - the downside is the random generation is somewhat unpredictable. Then again its seed based, so you can re-generate the exact same random thing if you want.
There’s a thousand and one topics just like this on this forum you need to search and read throguh.
Seeing what others habe come up with saves you the trouble of thinking too hard about it…
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