What is the maximum size that Unreal Engine supports/allows? For example, is it possible to create a map size as large as 500+ square kilo meters (Before anyone says, I know the resources needed for this). Thanks in advance!
There’s no magic answer dude, just different scenarios with differing levels of success. Its best to read through all the Large-Worlds threads on here. There’s not many and they cover just about everything. For now, consider that you’ll probably need to run your own tests anyway.
For example, I’ve an experimental prototype that’s ±2000km. To hit such a large area, UE4 landscapes are totally out. In fact terrain meshes aren’t practical either. So you will probably need procedural instanced meshes everywhere and a whole lot of LOD work. Plus some quite creative level design map choices.
But it is doable, if you work within the known limits, with the BIG exception of Multiplayer. 500km multiplayer would be stuff of legends. Tricky to pull off. Its important to understand the limits of Origin Rebasing and Physics too, on such a large playing-field…
Without using code or level streaming there is a hard coded limit… if you just drop a character into a map and start running the actor will be destroyed at some point… I used world machine to make a landscape a while back… cant remember if it was 8km by 8km or 16x16 but the actor did delete before it reached the sides of the map. It wasnt that important to me as i was just playing around learning world machine and what unreal could do with a large landscape so i dont remember exact numbers…
But @franktech** is correct there are many ways to simulate a larger map than unreal can really handle… I believe there hard coded constants are based on floating point limitations… a float is 32 bit. So 1.123456 is very accurate but 1234567.1 is not. So the max size for a xyz based on that is the largest number a float can be and still maintain accuracy **
These two settings for example always must be tweaked.
But they’re just World-Settings not quite hard-coded limits:
- World Settings → Untick Enable-World-Bounds-Check…
- In the same panel set Kill- Z to something astronomical
If you go to World Composition window, and zoom all the way out, at some point you will see an orange rectangle. This represents the largest possible landscape, which by my very approximation is around 16-20ish km^2.