Giant underground level designing

[Raneman]

Konichiwa guys!

Im making a cave/dungeon game and ive run into a problem — one of the levels is a huge ~2.5 kilometer lengh cave.
I thought it'd be fine to make a giant mesh that represents simple level geometry. But baking that mesh looks like would take forever.

Can you please advise me how that level could be done in any way?

[Crusha K. Rool]

In UE2, there was an option to invert Terrain, so you could use one TerrainInfo to sculpt the ground of the cave and another one for the ceiling. Maybe you can find such an option for Landscape in the UDK too.

[Raneman]

Oh man! Its really a perfect solution — and its much more comfortable too! Thanks. I hope there would be no problems with it.

[Max Power]

I've made tons of dungeons/caves for games, if the terrain idea doesn't work out, you should split up the mesh, a LOT. There's plenty of room for modularity and other time saving techniques. A single giant mesh is almost always the worst method.

[Raneman]

Max Power,
Well the main purpose of the mesh was to make a level with no gaps between smaller meshes that makes dungeon wall structure. So it was really low polygonal, about 500 poly. Would be splitting it reasonable? And btw where i can read about

There's plenty of room for modularity and other time saving techniques

?