Hello everyone, I’d like to make an open world game, but have some questions about level-streaming. From what I understand, I can trigger when to load certain areas of my level, so does this cause lag in the game? Can I do this without multi-threading? If I am driving a car in my level, can it cleanly just load what’s in front of me?
I was also watching a tutorial, where someone just split a level in half by selecting an area of actors, and making new level from selection, does this work good? And what about the floor? If I have a giant landscape, how does one cut the floor into different sections, or should the floor always be spawned?
Are there certain requirements when building the level so that level-streaming will work? This is all for now, thanks ahead of time!
Download Epic’s content examples from the marketplace. One of the examples is about level streaming, and should put you in the right direction.
Generally though, level streaming is designed to break up your world into manageable chunks that can be loaded and unloaded as you move around. It will be up to you to decide how big these chunks need to be so they don’t cause lag in your game when they load. Obviously putting a billion actors into a sub-level is going to cause some lag when it loads up, so you have to find the middle ground that works for your game.
Also, you are going to want to apply some level of illusion so the players don’t see it happening. If they walk into an empty room and witness everything pop into place, that is going to break immersion. So, you have to design things so that it seems as if everything was already there before they got there. For wide open spaces this is obviously much trickier, but between LODs and streaming you should be able to work it out.
Alright, now what is it that is weighed down if we didn’t do level streaming? (assuming the player could see the same things at a time with level streaming, and without) Is it the RAM, the CPU? The GPU?
Well, i am investigating if it is possible to stream yourself still inside your existing level into another level that looks thesame. But, with less detail in the last part you came from, and, with more detail loaded in the area you are walking towards. This means you are standing on an path between two seperate areas. In which the path in the middle is still thesame in both levels.
That is still what i don’t understand. Does that mean you create one level for the path + four other maps? For each side an low and high detailed version level that will stream in and out?