I’m new to Unreal and I’ve started a project recently. The game runs and plays perfectly fine so far, however I have noticed a number of issues and concerns related to the overall scale of everything in the game. The scale of things is roughly real-world, with 1UU equaling 1cm. However it is a game where you are flying a fighter jet, so you’re dealing with scales and distances much greater than your typical human-sized character would.
Some issues and concerns I’ve noticed:
- The brush size of Landscape editing tools is very small even at maximum
- The modelling tools, specifically the polygroup editing mode, becomes unusable when trying to edit meshes of large enough size
- Strange and ugly rendering artifacts on some simple materials placed on large meshes
- Shadow rendering distances-- things seem to flicker in and out very noticeably in some places
I’m also rather unsure of how performance of various things may or may not be impacted; like line traces are supposed to be more expensive the longer they are, right? And I don’t know what else.
Now I can go through and scale everything down. However, I did speak to the developer of a certain successful fighter jet game made in UE about my concerns, and he told me that he used real-world scale in his game project as well. So apparently you can create a game working at this scale just fine.
I still feel like I’m better off scaling things down before I go any further, but left wondering how one is meant to decide what scale is a good scale. Apart from some of the practical issues I found with editor tools, I’m quite certain rendering is affected by scale in various ways, and less certain that performance would be affected somehow as well. So there must exist some kind of ideal?
I’m just looking for any kind of wisdom relevant to answering this question: how do you choose a scale to work at?
