World Composition and 22k+ tiles

Development World Creation
1

I’m hoping maybe some of you who work with procedurally generated maps have some ideas here.

Basically, after waiting the 2 days of processing time for unreal to import my 22,701 tiles into the engine, it seems that nothing works in Pie with just world-comp enabled, and a light.

Can anyone offer alternative viable solutions to world composition or any idea as to what may be causing world composition not to load?

I’m currently using a tile size of 505, so the overall area is 114,640 KM, a sqrt of that gives roughly 338.5 KM x 338.5KM. Hardly a size that the engine should have trouble with if you consider things like Just Cause having 400 square miles as a map.

I’ll have to further look into it, but I also don’t understand why empty tile levels generated by the engine end up totaling 22GB when the tiles them self (PNG 16 format) barely total 287MB on disk.

Perhaps, it’s time to make up a system that reads the PNG tiles at run time sort of like the procedural things work. If any of you have any ideas on what would work best, I’m all ears.

2

Bump.

For the moment, I ended up going with tile size 1009 which reduces the amount of tiles to, well about half of what it was.
The size on disk is still insane.

3

Your viable solution is custom terrain rendering system.

4

Seriously considering it. Mostly just because of the published file size on the 70km^2 test.

My problem with making something is having to find a way to custom manage tile positions.
It’s not that it’s complicated, its that at this point i seem bound to get a 1000% better performance with custom procedural meshes and a channel packed texture to paint 4 landscape layers into the terrain.

For that to work correctly, I would need to figure out a way to cull the vertices by distance as well as with occlusion. Which will also take time to get right.