So I’m new here and wasn’t quite sure where this should go. I’m somewhat of a hobbyist, I like to fiddle around with various things be it Photoshop, Autodesk 3ds max or Blender but my irl job is as an electrical controls engineer. I got to talking with a friend about a game we used to play that is running on a very dated engine that is showing it’s age. It was shutdown in 2007 by Bandai, the game was called Universal Century Gundam Online and to date there is still nothing quite like it on the market, getting back to the point of this post, me and said friend want to see if it’s possible to remake this game or something like it for non-commercial use. I know there could be some kind of copyright issue, I’ll look into that myself and hopefully it wont be a problem if I’m just doing this as a hobby and seeking no monetary gain for my labor.
I wanted to try the Unreal 4 engine mostly because it’s free to download now of which I have, and I’ve always liked the way UE4 looked in other games I play so I figured what the heck and downloaded it to play around with, this game me and my friend want to recreate though was/is something of a monster of a game so to speak (It still exists in the form of a private server) and by this I mean to say that the file directory is small but the game world itself is massive, the game takes place on the continent of Australia and I would like to think the game world uses procedural generation as it literally takes days to walk across the continent in a 19m tall robot called a mobile suit but the idea of the game world being a static object that exists all the time as one giant continent seems a little impossible for the size of the file directory. I have Ghost Recon Wildlands and that game world is small by comparison to UCGO but the game files are massively larger, I’m not really sure how to word that any better, sorry. My UCGO game directory is less than 1gb.
The game we have in mind wont quite be the same thing as UCGO though, we’re more likely going to create it in the image of UCGO but at the same time it’s going to be a whole different beast all on it’s own with completely different content not found in the current UCGO game, like player housing for instance. I should mention that this game also has a level that takes place in outer space and it’s scale is literally from the moon to Earth with colonies around the Earth called Sides, it’s not exactly instanced either as there isn’t a load screen so to speak. When on Earth at either Darwin or Perth which are the games spaceports where the player boards a shuttle at a terminal much like an airport and launches into space via magnetic catapult, there is a short cut scene of sorts during the transition from Earth to space but it’s fairly seamless and lacking a loading screen.
So on to the point of this long winded post.
What is the maximum terrain size that UE4 can support, like in Km2 for instance if anyone knows.
I don't know if I should go with instanced areas or if I should try sticking with a procedural system like the current game likely runs on. I imagine it would cut down on file size dramatically if I stick with procedural generation. And if I do go with procedural generation, what is the distance at which the game world fades into oblivion or would that be something up to my discretion within practical limitations? Right now the terrain fades out of existence after about 1.5km and there is no draw feature in the current game to increase the view range, so hopefully if I go with procedural generation I can at least have something like 4-5km view range before the world fades into foggy nothingness.
Some of the features we would like to add to our game would be an FPS element for ground troops trying to take control points during resource wars in contested zones much like the current game has but the current system just requires players to stand in their giant robots next to a building to capture it which feels kind of silly and is somewhat boring. We would also like to have this same FPS element for the general game since players starting off in a giant robots is kind of game breaking even though the current game works fine on this system, it's still not very well fleshed out and currently that's all there is in UCGO which can get very boring very quickly. We just want to have some unique content and features to keep people on their toes and to keep game play exciting.
We also want to add content in space like an asteroid field and side colonies to have epic space battles in during a resource war, PvP is the sole basis of the current UCGO with minor npc PvE content that was created by the current owner of the private server, we want to go further than this and have PvPvE entangled as one, there is another private server group that managed this. They created a battlefield in which hordes of robots would fight each other between the factions of the Earth Federation and the Principality of Zeon that was a giant PvPvE slug fest, it was glorious and hilarious since npc's would attack players and other npc's alike while players attacked other players and npc's alike. Just one giant cluster of death and destruction.
So I'm just curious if UE4 will support these crazy things me and my friends want to create with this engine, we're all amateurs by the way, we're still pretty green and we're fine if it takes us 10+ years to complete this pipe dream game. Though I will mention that I am going to be enrolling at a language institute in Japan in November 2018 but this same language school also happens to be a college based around Manga creation, game design and 3D animation called Nihon Kogakuin Japanese Language School so I won't be too far away from a great source of learning material and education in regards to creating this crazy game my friends and I have in mind.
If you read through this wall of text, thanks for being patient. I look forward to any comments that may come my way be they positive or negative.