Unreal 4 Development Questions

Development World Creation
1

I am trying to understand how far we can push unreal engine in terms of avatars & vehicles, and how to handle scaling for performance considerations as well. Since I’m drafting design documents now I still have design flexibility to account for Engine limitations.

Right now we are looking at character avatars (default 192uu height) piloting giant robots that range from 8-30 meters in height on 5kmx5km maps that use a lot of landscape and have 9 bases/objectives/locations & various models placed that convey a good sense of scale and are destructible to varying degrees.

  1. Am I pushing max height to far with 30m tall robots? can I put avatars up that high on open landscapes or will I run into z-axis problems down the road?

  2. Add to this these robots should be able to jump even higher, how high can I push the z-axis in this - is the sky the limit ?

  3. also, how do I set speeds and calculate these correctly? I haven’t been able to find a way to measure/know how fast in km the mycharacter moves by default. Is there an easy conversion for this?

  4. How viable would it be to make everything on map levels destructible given enough damage/force? we want mechs to be able to walk through buildings and bring them down if they run into them with enough force. Deformable terrain? What limitations do i need to consider in terms of size/scale/image quality?

  5. Also collisions and being able to set collision forces between 2 robots when they collide so at lower speeds they don’t tip over, at higher speeds they do. and we need collision damage as well. we are considering a gyro system where every collision causes instability, and if enough instability is caused and the pilot can not compensate with keypresses, the mech will fall over and must get up.

  6. We want to give players a star citizen type experience where they are the avatar, and enter the robots/vehicles, and can control them from a first person perspective (no third person view at all possibly)

  7. Each Robot will have 9 independent damage locations, and segments must be destroyable and have front/rear armour for torso without destroying other segments. in addition robots might have various damage layers shielding, then armour, then internal armour layers. Is this viable to do in unreal engine 4?

2
  1. That’s not even a technical problem, you can make them as tall as you want.
  2. There is actually a limit on size of levels, but it’s extremely big, so there’s no problem there.
  3. You can setup how those control with Blueprints, or with C++
  4. Depends on how much time you want to spend, consider what other games are out there that do that type of thing–Battlefield 4 has lots of destruction but is still pretty limited, then there’s stuff like Red Faction which has more but is limited in level design and required a special physics system for it. There isn’t any way to do deformable terrain in UE4, that’s a very complicated problem–the source code is available to add that feature but it definitely would be difficult to add.
  5. Blueprints or C++ code, you can set it to figure all that stuff out.
  6. Definitely possible, considering stuff like Titanfall
  7. Yes, again it’s something you would have to setup with blueprints or C++.

Just compare your features to other games, a lot of these things are main features for games because they take a lot of work to setup, so you can get a good idea of what it takes to do that type of thing looking at those games.

3

yeah great thanks for your answers. I’m the design guy so I needed some clarity on this stuff before doing ridiculous design things outside the scope of possibility :slight_smile:

4

I do not think that word means what you think it means :wink: carry on my friend!

5

I’m busy making 20m mechs myself on a huge landscape but I was thinking of breaking mine up into level streaming.

6

maybe you should firs think about renderings on the map, level streaming can wait, even tough the gamers can’t :slight_smile: