Simple Landscape test map

[DGUnreal]

You can't scale all of your meshes by more than about a factor of 2. Otherwise you are going to run into a lot of problems with engine collision and physics etc.

To properly scale the world, as I mentioned in my post, you have to change the engine's scale units which requires re-compiling the engine.
But you can typically only go down to 1/2 the size or up to 2x the size.
The default engine units are 1 unit = 2cm.
See UDN Engine Units and Changing Units.
To quote: "Epic does not recommend changing the Unreal Unit scale by more than a factor of 2".

So even if you purchased an engine license, scaled all of your meshes down by 2 (which you would not do in this case), modified the engine scale by 2, and modified the engine world by 2, you would still only get a 10km*2*2*2 = 80km x 80km maximum map size.

And you can't do all of that with just the UDK.

You are free to try scaling all of your UDK meshes down to 1/20 size, but if things start missing on collision, and physics starts failing, don't be surprised.

[amigoface]

waooooooow ! i am still shocked ,
it cannot be real , how is possible that a millions dollars engine like ue3 with hundreds of title developped with it lack in this simple thing ?!?!?


from my understanding :
units are just .... units, we can make :
1unit = 1cm,
1unit = 1meter,
1unit = 1kilometer,

it's all about texturing and adding objects and things like objects and vegetations and such to make the visual illusion

[DGUnreal]

... how is possible that a millions dollars engine like ue3 with hundreds of title developped with it lack in this simple thing ...

UE3 is a First Person Shooter engine, it is not a MMO or Flight Simulator engine, so it doesn't natively support massive map sizes.
It also natively supports a maximum of 64 Players, which also is not MMO.

There are different types of game engines for different types of games.

... from my understanding : units are just .... units, we can make :
1unit = 1cm,
1unit = 1meter,
1unit = 1kilometer,

No you cannot do that. For the reasons in my last post.

[terranceklue]

As DGUnreal said the unreal engine is for FPS or similar shooters and not open world. Most open world games such as fallout for example using the Bethesda engine use cells...which is like making hundreds of unreal maps and streaming them together. at the cost of aesthetics though!

[WolverineFRS]

UE3 is a First Person Shooter engine, it is not a MMO or Flight Simulator engine, so it doesn't natively support massive map sizes.
It also natively supports a maximum of 64 Players, which also is not MMO.

There are different types of game engines for different types of games.



No you cannot do that. For the reasons in my last post.

I wouldn't say that the Unreal Engine is a First Person Shooter engine. It was long time ago but now it's a kind of very user friendly toolbag. There are a couple of Korean and Japanese MMO's using the Unreal Engine. Just check the links below.

http://www.mortalonline.com/index.php
http://www.bladeandsoul.com/global/en
http://www.globalagendagame.com/
http://www.tera-online.com/

[DGUnreal]

I wouldn't say that the Unreal Engine is a First Person Shooter engine. It was long time ago but now it's a kind of very user friendly toolbag. There are a couple of Korean and Japanese MMO's using the Unreal Engine. Just check the links below.

Yes it is.
I know what I am talking about.

Stock UE3 and UDK are limited to a world cube size of 524288x524288x524288 units and a Units Scale of 1 unit = 2 cm. Map play area is less than that due to distance-from-origin float precision issues. Plus it has a limit of 64 players. Period.

Epic Korea has heavily modified the original engine source code to "wedge in" their custom features for MMO use. This required heavy modification to the engine and replacing or rewriting complete sections.
The EK "version" of UE3 is totally different than UDK.

You cannot create a 200km sq. MMO or flight simulator with stock UE3/UDK.

[terranceklue]

I wouldn't say that the Unreal Engine is a First Person Shooter engine. It was long time ago but now it's a kind of very user friendly toolbag. There are a couple of Korean and Japanese MMO's using the Unreal Engine. Just check the links below.

Im gonna have to agree with DGunreal this engine caters to a third or first person shooter crowd! You can turn any engine into a rpg/mmo engine. Aion is a good example that uses the cryengine, even though oncce again the cry engine caters to the fps crowd! Any engine can be recoded to suit whatever needs you have given you have the source code, but once done its not really the original engine!

[SageHunter]

I wouldn't say that the Unreal Engine is a First Person Shooter engine. It was long time ago but now it's a kind of very user friendly toolbag. There are a couple of Korean and Japanese MMO's using the Unreal Engine. Just check the links below.

http://www.mortalonline.com/index.php
http://www.bladeandsoul.com/global/en
http://www.globalagendagame.com/
http://www.tera-online.com/

I would just like to point out that Mortal Online is not Japanese, nor is it Korean. It is made by a Swedish company.

I do wonder though how they go about on their map sizes though.

[gausswerks]

DGUnreal, great thread so far, thanks for posting. I think you're right that as tempting as it is to chomp at the bit, my own experiments with the Landscape system have earned enough crashes that I'll likely wait a little while, as well. When painting material layers in the editor for instance, sometimes it can get dicey when I'm painting across the boarders of the sectors. But that's game development for you.

Anyway I wanted to reconfirm with the more recent discussion about units--you may really have saved me some heartbreak here. I was under the impression that UDK would allow me to change enough with scale to make 1 uu = 1 cm work, but from reading your posts I believe my error was in reading UE3 licensee documentation as though it applied to UDK, which is not quite the case.

For certain purposes (and simplicity of exporting) I had begun setting my scenes and assets at 1 uu = 1 cm but if everything is pegged at 1 uu = 2 cm like you say it's not that much of an inconvenience to rework my few existing assets to suit. Certainly less so than realizing I've made a grave error much later in development. So thank you. Certainly bears the maxim that it's better not to fool around with anything if it's not for good reason; you may have helped me walk away from an unwinnable battle so thanks.

edit: also Terresculptor is looking quite good--what's the timeline for bringing it to commercial release would you say? Are there any other terrain creators that are even vaguely recommendable for use with Landscape?

edit2: found it "TerreSculptor HMES standalone version is expected to ship in Q1/Q2 2011" cheers!

[danimal']

Your 1uu = 1cm fits within his recommended "factor of 2" and I agree with him. You can absolutely fudge with the units a bit, which is his point, but when you go much beyond a factor of 2, things like physics and collision won't work well since they were designed for a certain scale. Honestly, you could probably get away with more than a factor of 2, but I think that's a perfectly good recommendation/rule of thumb. No need to re-do your work, scaling to 1=1 should be fine, but it's always worth testing out in practice and in particular pay attention to physics/collision.

P.S. thanks for the map DG, good stuff!

[gausswerks]

Well my concern is that the 1=1 scaling still involves creating work where there need not be any. I ran into some early roadblocks with getting the character and the character's eyeline up to the right scale, whereas if I keep it to 1=2cm I don't need to do nearly as much work. Just seems more intelligent for a small independent project.

Also I recall from the UE3 documentation on scale changes is that you want to adjust other factors, like sound attenuation with the scale, and that's just more work to be done, and another potential pitfall if it turns out for whatever reason I can't get access to changing those things in UDK.

But I don't mean to hijack the thread, I am very much looking forward to buying a copy of TerreSculptor.

[iniside]

Sorry for necromancy (hahaha), but it's no point to create new thread.

http://unrealitymag.com/wp-content/u...me-worlds2.jpg

According to his picture 10x10km is well enough to create Oblivion like world ;p.

I can kinda agree with this picture and scales it present. Played many MMOs (suspected to have big presitant worlds), and those maps are not that big at all. It's all about illusion of being big.

UDK may fit well, unless you want make huge maps 100x100km but.. Images how many resources you will need to to create that map. And by resources I mean raw data measured in gigabytes..

More intermediate problem is at what distance from origin the problems with float point precision start ?

[DGUnreal]

Some of the big issues are:
-The total size of Landscape. I see lots of the newbies trying to use 2048-to-4096-ish size Landscapes for their game. This is not the way to go. 4033x4033 is a massive amount of heightmap, mip, vertex, collision, and material data to be managed by the CPU/GPU. Most people cannot even build a 4033 Landscape's lighting on their systems with 16GB RAM. Streaming small pieces is the only good way to achieve this total size, but comes with the penalty of load hitching. If you are using a Landscape that is 1024 or higher, you should re-evaluate your design decisions.
- Attempting to populate a single entire 512k world is a massive undertaking, and chances are you will run out of system/GPU memory for all of the mesh/collision/texture/actor/properties long before you get all of the objects placed throughout the world.
- Even if you scaled everything down by a factor of four (the most you could ever hope for) to get 1 unit = 8cm the world would still be only 40km*40km. Assuming you don't start running into collision issues and other problems like falling through the world. If the meshes and objects are scaled down too tiny/small/thin, then the engine line-casts are going to start missing things. The engine just was not designed to go too far up or down in scale.
- The amount of work involved in creating a large game is huge, it requires a large team of artists, a massive budget just in hardware and software, and years in development time. Any indie developer is way better off starting small, actually completing the project, and selling their first game to get sufficient capital to hire people for something bigger. There is a reason why 99.99% of all games are not massive or MMORPGs. The majority of people tend to abandon large projects when they are into it 6 mo to a year and still see another 3+ years of hard work to go.

Precision errors create visual problems regardless of where you are, objects at far distances will overlap and trade-places in depth, the error will be somewhere I would guess at least 16384 over the distance of the world (I would have to look up the znear and zfar engine values again to calc this). I notice player movement innacuracies starting to show when moving at the outer fourth of the world, in other words, the center 262144 is relatively good (131072 out each direction from origin), the outer 131072 around the center starts to get bad with noticeable issues that would affect everything from player movement to projectile hit accuracy. This drops your usable world size at least in half.