Before I got wrapped up in a lot of other things, I was working on an openworld RPG about six years ago in Unity… I’ve decided to pick up where I left off, but in Unreal (as I’ve been using it for a while now)… I do have a quick question about it’s viability as I’m going to try and approach it in a different way to maximize performance and quality.
Before it was just one rather large terrain that was chunked / async loaded etc. etc.
Won’t deny I bit off a bit more than I can chew, so I’m going to downsize it drastically and change some methodologies. Initial thoughts is I’d to take advantage of lightmapping, but I’ve never used LM’s in such a large game before. It’ll essentially be 4 X 2KM2 city blocks walled off, instead of streaming / loading everything in on vector boundaries I’m looking to use loading screens (go back to the good old classics).
As far as I know games like Arkham City used lightmapping (although I could be wrong here) and that’s a relatively large game with a lot of detail in it… So I’m thinking I might be fine, I’m guessing not many people have tried this but thoughts appreciated.
You have to be careful. Light maps + texture res can eat all vram of a gpu if your level is too large.
For example, I have a Gtx 1080 8GB and a Gtx 1060 3GB ram. If I play Fortnite with all shadow effects to the max + high quality textured I have to use the 1080;
If I’m using the 1060 machine with shadows enabled, the terrain + props eat so much vram that the little gpu can’t handle it and video output sometimes shutdown mid-game!
So on the 1060 basically shadows must be disabled to make sure the game won’t crash.