So I have come to realize to make the physics area (the range that we can attack, see etc. anything that cant be done with data or math) a decent size we would need 40 square ocean tiles with our current “to life” scale. Currently its scaled so that every boat is as long as its real life counterpart, and this works perfect with the first person template because they look real-life sized.
1600 (40x40) ocean tiles is rediculous and theres no way the engine could handle that (each one is 81920 units long, just under 1km and currently we can drive across an entire ocean tile at full speed in a matter of 10-15 seconds tops) if we could scale the first person character and its mesh and view as well as our boats say 10x or more, we would havethat much more area to play in since we can change the scale of the waves to about that much, I havnt done much testing but id rather have a huge flat calm sea than 40 boats stuck hitting eachother in a few ocean tiles (Ive tested up to 6x6 and it runs, but cuts the framerate down pretty hard).
How might I get started in this process. would it be as simple as scaling the first persons capsule component down 10x and changing its base eye level to 1/10 the height, scaling the boats down 10x and then I’d have the same “view” just a larger world? I’ve done a little bit of research but havnt run into anyone who needs to scale the first person down and be able to drive vehicles and walk around them (ships in our game, see the siggy).
Edit: this didnt have to be in BP I guess, just doing all the logic in BP so far since my c++ skills are not so hot and I dont know anything about the Unreal API and coding without on the fly debugging is near impossible to me. Mods this can go to content creation if you feel thats a better forum.
Scaling down your player components is one way, but I’d refrain from doing so - there are a lot of issues that could crop up later going this route.
Have you looked into level streaming or world composition? This would only load elements as needed, and would allow for a vast ocean if used correctly.
Yes, the problem is like I said that you can move across the entire ocean (as I’ve said Ive tested it up to 36 tiles and it loads but the FPS starts to drop a little and I dont even want to think about having many ships and particle emitters and highly textured and detailed models with advanced materials… ) in just a few seconds, 1 tile is 1 km long and so even if we could pull of 36 (6x6) thats no more than a minute before you have to stream in the next tile. THe problem with this, is weapons and such. On a clear day you can see a large carrier 6 tiles away just barely on the horizon, not to mention weapons that can travel that far or greater. Aircraft present a larger problem, they are smaller so they might only be a pixel or two, but they will be at 200km out.
I’m just trying to increase maybe not physics range (the boats at 40km out dont need to have buoyancy or textures just a 1kpoly grey patch moving whatever bearing its moving, not that I’m an expert at LODs and the thought of how many LOD models and textures I would need to make it look nice scares me, not having a dedicated modeller on our team but all generalists who each have a strength) but the visual range. Remember with a periscope you can scan the horizon to 6x zoom. And in modern boats thats been increased up to 10x and even further…
Even if I had boats pop into physics range on the most basic of torpedos the mk14 thats 12+ km of range (1200000 units) foir the torpedo alone. And some torpedos from even the 70’s (our game starts in '52) could travel 7242048 CM… roughly roughly 40-45 miles.
Any other input. Getting to the point where I need to decide whether to start modelling in 1/10th or lower scale. My only issue I can see is with the first person controller, were just using the first person template with no mesh (aka no arms) since they only interact with buttons and displays.
One way would be too attach the tile to the player ship and have it follow the player but make the plane invisible to other players if you are going for mutiplayer. As long as the tile is connected to the player it shouldn’t have to that big either
I wouldn’t attempt to reduce the size of the assets as a solution. You’ll probably encounter so many physics issues that you’ll have to start over.
I would just create a C++ plugin that draws an extremely long mesh based on the camera view, and then tessellate any near parts of it. Or as Lenni said you could do the texturing and displacement in world space and then attach the ocean mesh to the player ship, it will follow them around and they won’t be able to tell that it’s moving.
I’m kind of surprised that you’re having performance issues though. How many polys is each tile? Also, moving 1km in 10 seconds is 100 m/s, which I thought was way above the top speed for most of these ships.
Absolutely that speed is ridiculous if these are ocean faring vessels (especially if they’re supposed to be large navy-ish vessels)
Destroyers (even current class Arleigh Burke and future class Zumwalt) max out in the 30 knot range
Air Craft Carriers (Nimitz, and even the future Ford class) also max out in the 30 knot range
In fact the fastest “large” ships the US Navy operates are very modern (the Littoral class high-speed patrol/counter piracy ships), their design goal was 40 knots and they didn’t meet it.
For reference, 1km in 10 seconds is 100 m/s. 30 knots is 15.4~ m/s and 40 knots is 20.5~ m/s. So even if these are futuristic ships there’s absolutely nothing on the horizon that’s anywhere close to them.
edited to add: read the signature and realized this is a cold war era submarine game
by far the most popular (US) submarine class of the time was the Los Angeles class, with an official topspeed of 20 knots (although unofficial reports claim up to 33 knots in some cases), the Ohio class top speed surfaced was only 12 knots, with 20 submerged and the ‘most modern’ cold war-era class of submarines (Seawolf, there’s only 3 of them, and they were built from 89-2005, so VERY recent) is 30-35 knots (basically in the same speed as the modern destroyers and aircraft carriers.)
If you can cross 1km in 10 seconds (100 m/s) that’s 194~ knots! WAAAAY too fast, and your “absolute max time” of 15 seconds is 66 m/s which is 128~ knots, still way too fast, up to 20x faster than the submarines you’re modeling after.