I was wondering if you will ever implement an easy way to create infinite worlds, although my project does not require infinite per say. There has to be an easier solution than level streaming to get this effect. Really what I’m trying to do is create a planet that I can fly down to, fly around the planet then take off back into space. I would think this would be an extremely popular feature request because the ability to create an infinite world would lend itself to giving the illusion of being on the planet surface itself.
I remember hearing from GDC presentation from some sort of epic lead programmer guy about limitation on how large world can be because of some vector space limitation and “it’s doable but require some work”
You can use level streaming to create an infinite world… or rather, a planet style infinite world where it’s basically a globe (you keep running straight, and you’ll come back to where you started from).
I have been looking into it a lot, so far no usable solution’s. Their are 2 reasons I wish to do this, first I want to create infinite space, although not really, just the ability to have large systems and warp between them, easily done with levels to a degree but the system is still limited in size greatly. Where my project really falls down is that I would love to be able to fly down to a planet and essentially load a planets worth of terrain in chunks as such, not too worried about the transition between space and land as I can use the burn into atmo to disguise the level change. In my opinion there is no easy way to handle this in UE4, especially for small developers. Procedural infinite runners are possible only within the realms of the skybox really. I agree that it may be a lot of work or maybe not even possible really but its something that may cause me to drop engine for this project, which is a shame because I love unreal engine in most other aspects. But of course that is what we all face, design within limitations! Such is life haha.
My solution thus far if this terrain is possible, first create a view distortion to create a horizon in the distance. Then create a slight tilt of the ship towards the sky over distance to complete the illusion of a curved planet. If I can generate the terrain for the planet I can create a height map (etc) of each “chunk” and lace it all together to generate the planets surface so it looks close in the in orbit planet model. The only thing missing is the infinite/Procedural terrain generation.
The issue with that is getting the terrain to link together from the air as such. Creating the surface area as big as I want without some form of terrain seed is quite difficult as each section wouldn’t match up. On a small scale planet or something that has little detail is possible I think.
In world machine, there is a node you can use to create terrains that can be stitched together seamlessly. The problem with this method is you need to make the terrain quite large in order to avoid repetitiveness. I usually just make the terrain completely flat on the sides for stitching. Then you can add roads / water-ways / cities to fill the gaps in the terrain.