Normally I would just google this sort of question but I get no useful results on this topic.
Google has no results found for “world partition region size” except for where I have asked this question.
None of the results for “world partition grid size”, at least the first 50 or so, answer my question.
I am feeling pretty stupid for not being able to understand what they mean by the tool-tip explanations. So could someone explain to me what these two settings actually change?
World Partition Grid Size: Number of components per landscape streaming proxies per axis
World Partition Region Size: Number of components per Landscape World Partition Region per axis
Is a streaming proxy the streaming source like the player character?
If the grid size is 2, does that mean 2 blocks on every side of the proxy? Does it mean 2 centered on the proxy?
I am glad that I am not the only person with this question. I am following a udemy course and they use a slightly older version of UE5 that doesn’t have the 2 separate properties, but if I follow along with the tutorial as is without changing those 2 properties, I end up, with what seems like, a world that is 2 somethings tall x 16 somethings wide. I am unsure of what those somethings are, but its definitely not square, which is what I intended on creating with my 32/32 number of components. Maybe the 2 x 16 grid represents what is visible to me from my current position? I don’t know. I will ask in the Discord channel associated with the course and see if anyone there knows, and post what I find here. Likewise, if you get an answer to the question, please update here as well
In the event someone else stumbles across this thread… To quote a Reddit thread (linked):
World Partition Grid Size: This determines the granularity of the landscape chunks, or proxies, that get streamed in and out. For instance, if you set the grid size to “2”, then your landscape will be divided into chunks where each chunk consists of 2x2 components. When the player moves around the world, these chunks (or proxies) get loaded/unloaded based on their proximity to the player.
World Partition Region Size: Regions are a higher-level organization structure in World Partition. While the Grid Size divides your landscape into smaller chunks, the Region Size groups these chunks into larger clusters.
The reason for having regions is to further optimize the streaming system. Instead of dealing with a huge number of individual chunks, the engine can handle a smaller number of regions, which each contain several chunks.
For better visualization, imagine a checkerboard. Each square on the checkerboard is a landscape component. If you have a “grid size” of 2, then every 2x2 block of squares is a streaming proxy. If you have a “region size” of 4, then every 4x4 block of these 2x2 proxies is a region.
Grid size 1x1 or 2x2 - reduces drawcalls by 1/2 when set to 2x2.
Region size: number of “blocks” (components) that make up the lansscape.
256x256 = 65536 drawcalls at lod0.
The lower the number the best your performance.
There is plenty of that peppered anywhere in the forum - try a search for more details
The
TLDR is:
Epic sucks; They made a flawed system 20 years ago, never changed how its constructed since. All they have done is to put stuff on top of the flawed system thereby making it worse and more expensive.
So steer clear, and use meshes instead to avoid having any performance issues.
Use stuff like sfx Houdini or Blender to develop your landscape and derive appropriately analytically reduced meshes with low tris counts.
Or - if you mess with the engine enough, bake out meshes to use in the final release. Never just use landscape if you can avoid it.
I have never tried that workflow. How does it actually work? Do you make the landscape just like you would in Gaea, then cut it up and stitch it back in the engine? How big are the pieces? Also just thinking about it, how would I go about making changes to the landscape down the line, like adding a cave into a mountain? These questions might sound stupid, but that is because I am when it comes to this. I have always been a landscape only guy. I am very curious to know, tho.
If you have to actively work, and make changes, then handle it in a DCC like any other mesh.
Pice size is variable, I think you have a better chance cutting them up based on tris count Plus size than just considering size alone.
It all depends on what you are doing and how you do it. Basic rule of thumb is to use the most commonsense ways to provide occlusion while retaining a fair total amount of parts…
You could even work in the engine and produce the landscape then force it to bake out level impostors and alltogether make a copy in which you only use the impostor meshes… it’s a fair starting place if you are completely lost actually.
Thanks for the answer. I’ll have to try this some day.
It’s crazy, I don’t consider myself an expert at all, but I have spent A LOT of time in this field and I have never until now seen or realized this as a solution over standard landscape.
Likely just means you never attempted to optimize a game for perfoemance. It’s common. Most people won’t even bother at the AAA level, so don’t feel bad, I guess. The AAA devs should 100% feel bad though…
