At Unreal Fest there was a presentation from a gentleman in the Flight Sim industry that talked about the challenges of developing a flight sim in Unreal. Around the 26 minute mark he talked about the specific challenges of round planets and the work he was doing in collaboration with Epic on this front. He mentioned that some of these problems would be solved in the “next release” of Unreal. Our studio is currently looking for solutions to these problems and would appreciate any info on the subject. Learning to Fly | Unreal Fest 2022 - YouTube
Could you elaborate further on what you wish to be solved? I know you linked a video but a video of 34 minutes will contain a lot of information.
The biggest problem in my mind is what the gentleman in the presentation called “Z-Assumption”, by which I presume he means that Unreal assumes that -Z is always “down”. This creates 2 main problems. One is the problem with Gravity, where Unreal assumes that gravity is always in the -Z direction, as opposed to toward the center of the planet. Things one takes for granted like the Character Movement component are hard-coded to use this -Z gravity. The other problem with Z-Assumption are that editor tools like Terrain and Foliage and even the way the camera works in editor make it nearly impossible to edit a planet. As an example, if you were working on the north pole of a planet everything would work basically as intended, but what about the south pole? The camera would be upside down, every object you tried to place would have to be rotated 180*, terrain sculpting and foliage wouldn’t work right, etc etc etc. The problems are legion. Beyond that, whether things like World Partition work on a sphere or not I have no idea, haven’t even gotten that far yet.