I am starting an RTS-game project with modular environment.
I’m wondering at what scale I should be working in the engine.
Does the scale of objects affect performence or would it not make a difference if I just scaled the entire world?
Does the distance of the camera affect the quality of the lighting and the shadows?
When the player zooms out is there some distance limit after which the rendering quality gets worse?
The same goes for zooming in. Could the rendering get worse when you zoom in closely on rather small objects?
The world will be quite large since it is part of the project that it contains natural environment as well as urban environment.
Is there any maximum distance I should use for zooming out?
Or any maximum area for the world?
I would like to avoid having to scale everything down halfway in the project and mess up Blueprints that rely on coordinates.
It’s is generally expected that you’d use a metric scale of 1cm = 1 unreal unit. I believe the maximum size for the physics world is 2x2 km so quite large and I believe in 4.6 it’s getting bumped to 4x4 km. For normal things you’d want to do with an rts, these scales are probably more than adequate and you’re not going to have any problems with size of objects causing you performance problems.
If you want to make a world that’s even bigger, you can just model everything at half scale and then bam your world is 2 times the size.
Camera distances for performance is really a tuning thing, you’ll need to tweak the shadows and maybe even make some lods for your units so that when you’ve got lots on screen it’ll all be buttery smooth.
Unfortunately I jsut don’t know a lot about tuning the render and shadow options and all that.
I’ll just try it with a relatistic scale now where a person would be about 180 units tall.
Scale is actually just what you make of it. Currently it is default to be 1cm per Uneal Unit. But iirc in UE4.6, they will be chaning this. It is basically just a label applied to unreal units but based on the game you make, those can be really not good. For example, if you were to make games that display whole galaxies a scale of 1 UU = 1 cm would not make sense. For an RTS I would probably go with a bigger scale, maybe 1UU = 1m, since you wont really need that small amount of detail.