Hi, this is my 1st post here. I have a question about world composition.i’ve calculated my world size. and i came to the conclusion that 1350 km² would be a good size. the thing is it’s quite impressive, i must admit. it’s bigger than Just cause 1 map, which is gigantic. and this is why i post. regarding your experience, do you think it can be done. knowing the vast majority of the map will be nature only (vegetation with few roads, few animals). only a very small part of the map will have a town with detailled objects. so before going futher, i’d like your thoughts about this. does it sounds possible to you on a technical level (fps, bugs…). Thanks
That’s an unreasonably large map, you need to think about what the value is in having a map of that size
thanks for the answer. yeah i know it may sound a bit ambitious. but i know what i’m doing on an artistic level. i just want to know if it’s technically doable. if UE can render such terrain. i could eventually split the map in 3. with loading times/teleport triggers between the areas
I have a map of 5*2.5Km for my game and it is already a huge map to walk through. I cut the map up in squares of 250meter each and used the OpenWorld composition mode for it. It has some drawbacks with regards to knowing exactly when maps are being loaded, especially when you teleport to a location that is not streamed in, but it seems absolutely doable from my perspective. There may be problems with lighting if you want to use static lighting because you have to light levels one at a time and thus there will be artifacts at the border lines.
Also, with regard to navigation maps, check out this video I link below. In fact the whole playlist is interesting since it deals with large terrains.
&t=12s
Part of it is thinking about whether it’s actually fun to have something that large, you can’t possibly fill it with enough unique content so the only thing that’s there is the size which isn’t that important by itself.
Besides that, there’s some technical issues, for physics maps are limited to about 6km x 6km and larger than that you can experience problems with physics, so unless you make a bunch of repeating tiles then you’d have to have over 65k tiles. Besides that, you have to think about how much data the game is going to be by itself, while you can technically have the game load between an infinite amount of maps, you still have to store and distribute the files.
i’m sorry i don’t get that part. can you elaborate a bit. are you talking of 6x6 tiles
Yes, 6x6 tiles
Why would you worry about any of this when the modular levels and the ability to load in different portions of the map dynamically via streaming exist? You can just make whatever the proper tiling needs to be and build multiple layers with proper height-field maps provided the end number is a power of 2 (i think a power of 2)
I recommend this live training for some extra info and just a decent once over of what can be done.
Also who says that filling in 1350km of a map is hard when Daggerfall had 160,579.26 square kilometers some 23 years ago?
a 1350km x 1350km map is more than 11x bigger than Daggerfall.
And while you can make something that repeats tiles, what’s the value in seeing the same thing over and over again?
The 6km x 6km limit is for physics, you can make larger maps but beyond 6km the physics have problems.
How is 1,350.00km^2 > 160,579.26km^2 ?
¯_(ツ)_/¯
if i make 6x6 tiles this is only 37.5 tiles. i don’t find this ‘exagerated’
If you do 1350 km² for a game that would be absolutely insane. You will never fill that area with content. Everything over 400 km² (20*20km) will run into technical problems regarding precision as far as I know.
If it’s purely for demonstration then go for it and try it out but 400 km² would still be huge enough.
Rendering all at the same time should be possible with a powerful machine and world composition proxy lod levels. Also remember that foliage (trees) will be baked into the LOD texture. That will only work for very far away tiles.
no it’s not for a demo, it’s for an open world game. but actually i just realised i messed up in my sketch :o. the good news is i need something much smaller. my map can fit in a 700 km² area. so now, if what you said is true, which i believe is, i need to know if it’s possible to split a huge map in 2 entities separated by a loading time (unless of course someone has a better solution)
The limitations are all in your minds. The tech is there, and unreal level composition works and has been used to author even larger maps.
that said, its entirely possible that darthviper was correct with the physic limitation, but if you Google it, his posts are the only ones that come up stating that the physics break down because of floating point precision.
In the same post he also tells you that world composition avoids the problem altogether.
Ergo, the issue would only be present if you make a very large map without using world composition - or, if your streamed levels add up to more then 6km at a time.
On top of it, this was something that was apparently corrected
Also, as a general rule of thumb our eye sight is about 5km diameter (before the earth turn away from sight, you still see mountains further) so I doubt world composition wasn’t built with those limitations in mind.
all is certainly possible, but it also only takes a few minutes to try it out by baking flat world panels together…
The map can be at any size, but it must be a multiple of a 6km x 6km main cell (where physics are OK) and when going out of that main cell you need to use world origin rebasing (or shifting) to bring the next cell inside the main cell is located and where the physics are OK. This is the theory and the ways are present in the engine, doing it is another entire issue I am afraid. Since my game projects will use procedural generation I have stopped researching this, so I can’t be of any help pointing out a specific tutorial about this (mainly because I think it does not exist).
A whole separate can of worms, but it is indeed common with AAA setups. Read this for some theory on solving it.
https://www.pcgamesn.com/playerunkno…nreal-engine-4
Also
This was the link I was missing.
Most issues with physics happen with networking for multiplayer games. A single player game can have tiles up to 20Km x 20Km and with World Composition and origin rebasing there should be no issues even with very huge maps.
https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/736340/is-world-origin-rebasing-working.html
yeah, not sure i told it already, but i want to make a solo game, no multi. yeah i’m going to dig this. Thanks
Can you fix network physics with just some cell transform numbers on client’s end? You won’t be shooting physics far across cells but I don’t see why that should break otherwise… Guess I’ll just test for myself
what is a good tile size for very large terrains (mine is around 450 km²). should i use large, medium, or small tiles. i tried with the largest (1024 components), and it seems to work; at least for the first 64 km². only drawback i have, i have to deactivate cast shadows when rebuilding, or it crashes. but i consider this as a rather minor issue. but before going further, i’d like to hear your thoughts