So I’m working on this game. It’s going to have several “biomes”, aka plains, desert, snow mountains, underground, and “the edge” (an alien landscape sorta thing)
Alright.
So I have world machine, and know how to use it’s very basic functions. But will it work for me? The world is going to have dungeons and a large city and all sorts of stuff, is it possible to build large worlds with different terrains at all? And if not, then how else can I go about making better looking worlds? UE4’s sculpting doesn’t seem to be useful for creating actual worlds, more like editing them.
Any ideas/comments would be amazing! Thanks a lot!
I’m learning the same thing right now. I tried making several tiles each being a biome but that limits you to square biomes and the tiles were not going together 100% accurate.
So what I have done … try number 2 is make a basic land scape map no hills… just rivers and grass with small elevation differences to keep the world looking not flat.
and scaled it up length and width but not height.
I’m making the smaller areas / biomes and exporting as mesh … I put that in a 3d modeling program and cut the parts I want a place them on the landscape as a static mesh.
The issue with doing that over importing it as a landscape that I have found is lod’s. you would need to make your own with static meshes,
The plus side with using mesh’s is texturing. You can add as much detail to the landscape as you want.
I have not tested this in a full game… only a small area with 5-6 mountains as static meshes … the fps seems ok but in a full work I have no idea how it will affect it.
make one heitmap of the world and make on master material whit al the materials for a dester snow and make in the editoer the bioms and then put you material in it and paint the bioms like what ark didt
The artists at EPIC that build real games, as well as cinematic demos for the engine, seem to do well with the built-in sculpting tools.
Yes; as you get further from the center of the world, the physics engine (using single-precision floating point) will end up losing precision. A typical size for good physical gameplay is 2x2 kilometers. You will want to use world origin shifting together with level streaming to build areas bigger than that.
However, I see this:
and I’m pretty sure you won’t get where you want to go. It sounds like you’re alone, and you have no experience in how much work it actually takes to build game-ready art.
I suggest you start with a very small vignette – like a single city square, or a single level of a dungeon – and build it to the level of gameplay you want to deliver.
See how long that takes, and how much you learn from doing that. Then you’ll be better prepared to slightly expand the scope of what you’re doing (and knowing how much work you can do in any given month.)
if you want biomes, often the easiest thing to do is realistically simulate a spherical planet. this will give you a difference in temperature that will drive map diversity.
simply change the generation so that the middle of the map has a height of 0-200 and the top and bottom of the map have a height of around 2000.
this will make it so you can use the heightmap as a temperature map, with the top and bottom (the poles) being colder.
past that, make a bunch of comparators to compare slope and temperature, and assign a biome, ie. hot and flat would be a desert, hot and mountainous would be a rainforest, freezing and flat would be arctic, temperate and hilly would be deciduous, etc.