UE3 - General Giant world map

[Faurax]

Hi i´m Faurax and I got a question about level design size. In mostly big online games, the map is not only a little level. It´s made of a few but very large continents full of different areas and climates. anyway, is it possible to make that kind of big maps to walk around at in Unreal Engine 3 UDK in a simple way? I understand that a computer can´t upload everything at the same time like in small Unreal Tournament levels. But the sky mesh should prevent outer objects from render at to long distance from the player.
Unreal Engine must have some functions for an open world based game.

 

[Wormbo]

No, it doesn't. Engine internals prevent a world size beyond a few hundred thousand units in each direction from the origin. If you want a larger world, you will have to come up with a way to fake it with the limited level size and potentially several levels.

 

[Faurax]

Well, it doesn´t really have to be an open world. It would be to much for the editor itself. It only has to look like it in the game. Does anyone know of a trick? to make the game open an other level when the player reach a place. Just so that it looks like the player is on the same level while the player is actually on a new level without noticed it. Or something like that?

 

[evilmrfrank]

No, it doesn't. Engine internals prevent a world size beyond a few hundred thousand units in each direction from the origin. If you want a larger world, you will have to come up with a way to fake it with the limited level size and potentially several levels.

Could always scale your game much smaller

 

[Sjosz]

Well, it doesn´t really have to be an open world. It would be to much for the editor itself. It only has to look like it in the game. Does anyone know of a trick? to make the game open an other level when the player reach a place. Just so that it looks like the player is on the same level while the player is actually on a new level without noticed it. Or something like that?

Having triggers at edges/exits (like say Borderlands) would work. just build levels with end points that would load a new level, and make it load a new level.

 

[Wormbo]

Could always scale your game much smaller

Not really. The "relative size" stays the same, as you only shift the problem to smaller floating point exponents. The type used to track player locations is a single precision type and only has about 7 to 8 decimal digits of precision. In network games you are further limited by the fact that vectors are compressed by truncating the fractional part, thus limiting the possible amount of downscaling.

 

[Bi()ha2arD]

Can't you just somehow stream levels?

 

[Wormbo]

Streamed levels share the same origin, thus the result is the same as if you put it all in one level.

 

[Angel_Mapper]

Like Wormbo said, you'd have to fake it if you needed a really, really large space. Say... an impassable mountain range with caves and teleporter trickery to move you Pac-Man style to the opposite side of the world space.

 

[Faurax]

interesting... About the trigger at the level end. Is it possible to make it load the new level when the player reaches the trigger and still having the old level visualized if the player turn around just a little bit to see it, and then stop visualize it when the player is to far in the new level?

Or can the teleporters make the visual effect of not leaving the old level?
The teleporters can visualize a little bit of the place it teleports a player into, but is it possible to change the effect setting on it so that it only shows the place without special effects that makes it look like a teleporter. Just like looking right into the new level and teleport to it without any sound or effects that blows the cover of the teleporter.

The player itself doesn´t have to have a long range of sight

 

[Wormbo]

You could simply duplicate the visible things near the transition spot and make the teleporter invisible.

 

[Faurax]

hmm, yeah that sounds more like a simple solution. Make the ends of all levels dead zones-like. No living creatures where the ends and the invinsible teleporters is placed. And just make the new level load some of the earlier level´s contents. If I just figure out how to make some of the teleporters effects to turn of when teleporting. It would probably be a very good way to handle the levels one by one and still get the feeling like it´s all one big world. I will try that, but if someone have an other way to solve the problem. Please explain it. I am open for different solutions.

 

[brunomartelli]

any tips on turning off teleporter effects?

- i have got a map which fills the unreal grid areas so its about 10 km wide

hmm, yeah that sounds more like a simple solution. Make the ends of all levels dead zones-like. No living creatures where the ends and the invinsible teleporters is placed. And just make the new level load some of the earlier level´s contents. If I just figure out how to make some of the teleporters effects to turn of when teleporting. It would probably be a very good way to handle the levels one by one and still get the feeling like it´s all one big world. I will try that, but if someone have an other way to solve the problem. Please explain it. I am open for different solutions.

 

[brunomartelli]

you could check out here:

http://forums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?p=27483646

 

[Hakamitokage]

You could invest ten minutes in learning how to do level streaming. It's pretty painless.

 

[Sjosz]

Level streaming is absolutely required for anything this size anyway, even if you only use it to maintain an acceptable level of performance.

 

[Bossgator]

Hey all, recently made the decision to make the move away from the Battlefield series modding, though I'd like to see DICE back modding with a new editor and support like Unreal, but decided to joinan UT3 project. Though I dabbled for a short time with UnrealEd with UT2004, I'm not up to speed yet on the map sizes in comparison, among many other things. We going to be using the UDK.

A 10km wide map in Unreal? How does that compare to a 64 player "1024x2" Battlefield 2 map?

There have been attempts at a 1024x4 BF map, but there are issues, but that's a pretty big map. That map size is supposedly 4kmx4km to scale. Not a distance you want to walk as a player. A 2km square map in BF is really too small for aircraft, but can be really dense if there weren't performance issues with amount of content in smaller area.

The streaming levels concept I like, because the reality is that you can put only so much content in a given space, and players like variety. Too much, and you sacrifice in other areas. I'd rather have a level that plays smooth, with a little transition to another area. I guess it's choice of the environment because outdoors has a whole different set of issues with map size. An indoor environment you can cheat visually much easier.

Is there a central location for all the stats such as scales and units, map sizes, scaling of custom models, stair sizes, etc?

The map community for Unreal I've always been impressed with. Tons of info, almost too much available to sort through. All the videos people do is awesome. It was nowhere near this in the Battlefield modding community. It is nice though that people are so active in Unreal mapping.