I and my friends are making a mod and some of the creatures/characters (sorry I’m not familiar with any terminology)
that we have planned are going to be massive.
Because of the size, I’m worried about the capability of both the engine and players’ PCs being able to handle processing and rendering them, so I was wondering if anyone could inform me as to if there is a maximum size limit for characters and what the ramifications of such a large creature would be?
I don’t think the engine has a limit on character size, however using massive characters will scale up the necessary performance power you will need to run it in a few ways. A larger character will most likely contain more vertices to be drawn on it’s own, and it will also likely require a larger world for it to move in, which adds extra over-head for the CPU. Second, the larger character will likely require larger textures, which will consume more memory, and more cost on the GPU to light it.
However, you can be smart about it and optimize your game in a way that allows you to make it work without much of a performance hit. It’s a matter of controlling what the player sees, and how much the computer has to draw every frame. In Dark Souls, they tend to confine most of their battles with huge creatures to smaller, simpler, spaces. That way the game doesn’t have to draw too much when the large character is in the scene. In Horizon: Zero Dawn, they make use of a lot of occluding geometry in fights with large creatures. The computer is only drawing what the player has to see (the view Frustum). So, if you have a large wall between your camera and a large open-world, the computer is not drawing what’s behind the wall until the player needs to see it.
Put simply, if you’re using these huge characters in large open spaces or with lots of highly detailed meshes, some even destructible, you’ll prob reach a degradation in performance. Optimize your game, by asking what the player needs to see at this moment in this very place, and you should be fine.
Thank you very much, I appreciate the answer.
And I will be sure to take this info into consideration.
Again, greatly appreciated!