I apologise in advance for what may be quite an abstract question!
At moment I am approximating (a small) part of original resident evil game purely to learn mechanics of UE4.
For those who do not know original game, each room was its own level in a ‘mansion’, with a (now iconic) loading animation of an opening door between levels.
My question is; when creating a similar game, are occlusion algorithms within UE4 powerful enough to have entire ‘mansion’ as one level (bear in mind that rooms will mostly be, well, room-sized!) or am I better off having each room as a level, or somewhere in between?
You might want to start experimenting with Level Streaming. You can set each room as a level and only load assets within it when player crosses into Level Streaming Volume. Using Level Streaming, you can build entire mansion in a level and just stream pertinent information during play.
Unfortunately, there isn’t any documentation on that available quite yet, so I’ll give you a basic rundown of how it works and you can play with it from there.
Separate your assets into levels (using Levels tab found in Window > Levels). persistent level will always be loaded. When you place a Level Streaming Volume, expand volume over area you want level to consist of. Then in your Levels tab, right click on level you want to associate with your volume, and go to Streaming Volumes > Add Streaming Volumes. Now when your character enters volume, assets in that volume will load in, and after leaving volume those assets will be unloaded.
A couple things to be aware of:
assets are loaded in when active camera enters volume, so be careful when setting size and location of Level Streaming Volume if your camera is positioned off your character.
You can use multiple streaming volumes per level, and you can use different brush shapes, so don’t worry if your level isn’t perfectly rectangular!
Make sure your Level Streaming Volumes are in Persistent Level or they will not work.
Anyway, I hope that answers some of your question. Good luck!