Hi,
I wanted to seek some advice here before I go down the wrong path, where I wanted to create a single landscape that has progresses between 2-3 scenes. It would have different buildings, foliage, etc for each different scenes.
For example a pre-war and post-war scenes. In one scene, it would have 50 buildings perfectly built; and post-war, these buildings would be destroyed, etc. There are not much sharing of static meshes between each event except for the landscape terrane itself.
Should I create a different level all together or should I use data layers? Thanks.
Doesnt really matter.
The end result for performance and things is likely the same.
The way you should look at it is - will things and missions be persistent throughout all of it, or will post/pre etc. Cause side objectives outside of the changed area to be unavaliable/different?
If they are to be different, a new level will enforce that by removing them alltogether.
If they arent, then a new level means you have to bring in and place the assets/markers whatever else yet again.
There’s also the fact that progress made by the player could be erased by swapping levels depnding on how you do it. Afterall you are re-loading fresh instances, so anything the player changed will be gone.
The one exception would be landscape manipulation - since that is not real time by default, changing the actual lanscape would require a level change. Bomb craters are essentially a no go…
I have further questions about this topic; does procedural foliage support data layers? Can I create a scene with a lot of trees with procedural foliage and then hide it in another scene of the same landscape? (e.g during pre-war with lots of trees and post-war which doesn’t much trees).
However the foliage does support real time editing.
You just have to break into the instances and remove them from the main actor with a loop - usually a fixed size batched loop so as to prevent endless loop errors.
It’s fairly simple to create a volume, run a trace, and loop though the intersected instance indicis whenever the level loads - may take up a couple seconds of processing time, but it can happen during runtime as well so long as you point the camera elewhere
