ON WORLD COMPOSITION :
I have spent the rest of the week trying to get World Composition up and running in my game. This has been somewhat confusing because the documentation on World Composition is unclear in areas.
For starters : They say you can add levels to “Layers” which had me bring up the Layers Window and wonder why Layers was not talking to Levels at all for a day.
The photos in the documentation don’t actually specify where to create these Layers with the “Layers” button (which is merely a Plus symbol in the World Composition window). So that is partly why this is so unclear.
Other Problems :
Once in World Composition it sees all Maps in your game, whether junk or not. So putting them in Layers (some of which I named Test_Layer or OFF_LAYER) is essential for sorting.
When you bring up your game as a new session, it doesn’t remember what Levels you had previously already loaded and were working on. This may not sound like a big deal, but when there are twenty to forty levels in your core game, it’s a lot of turning things on just to get started again. So it doesn’t remember.
If you were unfortunate enough to try to hit the “Play” button without sorting (i did this many times) then EVERYTHING in your maps, everything that is a MAP will get turned on as long as it’s in the default range to you. This means my game kept crashing and I had no idea what was happening. My thought was that my nodes in Blueprint that would stream things in, would still control everything, but no… if your Levels are in Uncategorized, then they ALL LOAD UP.
This had me scratching my head for quite awhile.
I tested this system out in small games that I made just for testing, and I still have no idea why it wasn’t working at all. I would remove my sub levels, and switch to World Composition and nothing would happen AT ALL. That meant I had to go back to my full game and test this, which is a major drag when trying to figure something out for the first time and get a beat on what the heck it is doing.
Once you create a LAYER you cannot edit the parameters, i.e. the distance that turns that layer on, or even if it doesn’t use Streaming Distance at all. Once created if you change your mind you have to create a new Layer, and i’m pretty sure you cannot delete layers… which in development time for a game is going to lead to a lot of junk and confusion.
BENEFITS :
I’m not sure yet fully. I’ve sorted all my Levels into Layers, I’m testing my shadow renders right now, and will continue to test for the different actual game levels and see how this goes. Again the goal is to render shadows and once combined, have ZERO shadow errors. Again this isn’t about repressing shadow errors, as any shadow errors from my experience will result in SLOWING the game down dramatically. Most people may be unaware of this, but having tested my game on not very good computer systems, I am keenly aware of where the slowdowns are.
PROGNOSIS :
hopeful. I like the idea of World Composition but this needs to be fleshed out a bit more with the users in mind.