Unreal 4-5 max map size? (Survival game)

Good afternoon, we are novice developers. I’m interested in this question, what is the maximum map size possible in the Unreal version 4 and 5 engine. I read that the Deadside developers want to make a map of 225 square kilometres, but right now they only have 25 square kilometres. Is it possible to make a map of 400-500 square kilometres in size. Or will I have to switch to Cryengine? Please tell me what is the maximum possible map size possible in games on versions 4 and 5.
We are developing a Survival game so map size is one of the most important aspects for us. Thanks in advance dear forum users.

Hello Shalcapone.

I spent some time Googling on the Internet and could not find anything that would suggest that the regular UE4 or UE5 will work with map sizes of 225 square km.

I found the following:

The claim is UE4 is recommending 21 square km. Apparently, there are some safe guards that can be ignored of which the above article shows what happens if you go beyond the 21 square km recommendation.

The claim is that the world coordinates are single precision floats.

Anyway, there is a claimed new feature in UE5 called World Partition which may allow for a larger world map. Then I found this…

Large World Coordinates in Unreal Engine 5 | Unreal Engine Documentation.

Claims that UE5 has a large world coordinate option which switches world coordinates to double precision floats.

Claim if you set "UE_USE_UE4_WORLD_MAX=0 " that you can get 88 million km. Is that 88 million square km???

Anyway, seems like UE5 might be able to do 225 square km using Large World Coordinates.

Would probably have to do some experiments to see if this is indeed true.

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their is no limit for map size in UE_1/2/3/4/5 … just do it on engine standards… dont make one block of 225 square kilometres instead do it in many blocks and later connect all blocks … the same thing done in PUBG

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All I can say is “true that”.

Working on 4.26.2… …I cannot speak to what PUBG did, or does; however, I did what Alexa.kl said what not to do in that I tried to make one 8129x8129 map and could not make it work well. I was able to make a 2017x2017 map; however, this too was too big. I am currently at an 8 by 8 grid of 1009x1009 map pieces and that seems to be running well.

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Thank you very much guys. For answering on my question <3

use world partition. I have project contains 300 km railway of one direction. my world contains 17 seamless submaps

How do you manage in terms of performances? I think i’m doing something wrong, but i’m having a lot of issues in working with such a large landscape.

Here is my hardware:
Intel 13900k
64GB DDR5
RTX 4080

What i have done:
I created a world using photoshop + Gaea. Exported using split method in 4x4 8k pieces (total resolution 32k x 32k)

I created a new level in my project and used the tool → convert to world partition.

Now the fun. Any attempt of loading the heightmap miserably failed in various crashes. I did MANY researches online and found the following combo to work: Go from DirectX 12 to 11 + disable edit layers.

That done, 30 minutes later the world loaded. Nice.

The problem now is that any small change takes a lot to propagate. I can sculpt the world, but if i apply a material, i wait 10-15 minutes. If i change a parameter in the material, depending on which one is it, i wait 10-15 minutes. If i remove the material… 10-15 minutes.

Very often the program just dies on me with horrible crashes that gives no error messages (unreal just closes…)

I’ve read of legends of peeps handling similarly big landscapes with 1070Ti and 3080s…

I double checked my hardware with benchmarks and everything seems fine. Virtual memory is quite large (managed by the system, but it expands a lot). No other programs are open other than chrome.

I’m new to this and i’m learning. I’ve done some researches that got me that far, but now i’m really stuck, that’s why i’m posting here for help.

Thank you for any answer.

you need to playing with res of imported textures. try to split in 2k pieces or less. yes it will be alot but this is world partition system made for.
also as i remember imported texture must be with landscape-compatible resolution, and its not 2^x
take a look at my world and its pieces.
this world was made with 1080ti and 32G RAM (or 64, dont remember)