Seamless planetary rendering with subterranian interior

Development World Creation
1

Hi there,

To start of its worth mentioning I’m quite new to Unreal, I’m learning from Unreal Sensei and related sources in order to get up to speed.

However that hasn’t stopped me from dreaming big, and recently I’ve begun to wonder about the feasibility of a game idea I’ve had for ages. I wanted to create this topic to (hopefully) run it by some of the experts to see if I can get pointed in the right direction.

So the concept is quite simple in setup, but more complex in execution. Basically what I would eventually like to achieve is a flight action game with a seamless fully rendered planet you can fly across without loading screens. Now I know that on its own has been done before in different games, and I also know that some people have achieved similair things in Unreal as well.

However, on top of this. I would also like to be able to fly inside the interior of the planet. Through large caverns and caves, and fly towards the core, and eventually out the other side. Again without loading screens.

My dream is to be able to fly my cool spaceplane from ground to high altitude (say 100km) then back down again at rapid pace, and fly into the interior of the planet.

The planet itself doesn’t need to have the most detailed surface, as in this game its purely about the flying. So you would never get out of the cockpit and walk around. And you would only be on the ground when landing/taking off/crashing.

Basically I want a game with the level of (ground) detail of a game like Ace Combat 7, but instead of it being seperate levels, its one big explorable planet. Including cities, forests, mountain ranges, deserts, vulcanoes, vast oceans etc.

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In this world that I’m invisioning there would also be some weapons that could do persistent damage to part of the planet. Think big craters and even entire parts of the surface missing, exposing the network of caverns underneath the surface.

Ofcourse this would also influence flight mechanics and gravity.

Lastly, in the endgame I invision the player getting acces to planes that can fly extremely fast and high. Not outer space like, more suborbital.

I know its a daunting task for a single developer to have all of this. Which is why I want to start playing around in Unreal to see what I can do myself. And then determine where I would need to hire extra people to work on the other elements of the game.

If you share my vision perhaps you could help met get pointed in the right direction. I know making a game like this would require knowledge of multiple systems of the Unreal engine, as well as maybe even developing entire new ones.

I’m just passionate about making games and I really can’t get this particular idea out of my head. And I do believe this idea could catch on with a certain crowd.

Thank you!

2

Its not impossible, for a team of prefessionals.

For a single person, it’s just not that feasible unless you want to spend a few years on it.

Either way the best advice I can give you is to use anything but unreal…

For the rest, you can look up planetary topics via a forum search. There’s 1001 answers on similar topics with detailed examples and systems to levarage.

Also, fwis Astroneer is exactly what you are thinking…

3

Well my idea was to see what was possible and then scale back features untill I’m left with something realistically attainable.

I do intend to spend some years on it, I just need a good place to start.

I have played Astroneer but I’m really interested in something on a larger scale. Astroneer has very cool cutesy artstyle, but very tiny planets.

4

They aren’t that small, I think the overall map size is larger than that of most aaa games.
Possibly even larger than Oblivion overall.

A similar but different version of this would be NoMan’s Sky.
However on that one you cannot go through the planet…

Both games use Voxels. So you probably want to start there.

There are size limit to things, mostly due to units of measure (of data, bit storage for float vs double and the like).
That doesn’t mean the limits can’t be creatively exceeded if you design your own system(s). But you also need to “dress” the map with things, so if you do it manually it will take tons of time.
If you do it procedurally, then things can (and will) look wierd at times…

5

Thank you for the reply. I was thinking voxels myself, although I don’t really see the need for real-time deformation. I would have to drop the destruction feature. But that’s more of a wishlist item anyway.

I know there are things like level streaming, loading/unloading chunks of the game world. But I don’t know whether that’s possible on a large 3D sphere instead of a (relatively) flat map terrain.

Like I said the ground detail doesn’t have to be the highest, because you’re never going to see it from upclose. As long as the scale is somewhat there. I think if you’d have a planet that was 75 or 70 percent earth size you could already get a good sense of scale.