Hey,
I have a kind of specific problem. I have an open world game which is slightly restricted, navigation vise. The world roughly consists of one big landscape. The actual region the player can access however is made up of multiple rectangular sections that are connected together. Kind of like sections in the old pokemon games were connected with the one difference, that you can see past the “gameplay borders”. Meaning when you are on on a high place with a good overview you should be able to view beyond the rectangular borders and see the rest of the terrain in the distance.
I looked a little bit into world composition and it looked like the exact thing I want to do, however I face a few problems using it with my rectangle levels. As I understand there are 3 ways of implementing this. (I’m no expert so this might be totally wrong)
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I create a huge landscape with a heightmap, then I create levels change the size of the created level bounds actor and place my stuff in there. Pros would be that I can change the terrain after creation as much as I want. But the cons would be I could not change the levels in any way, because the actors would detach from the ground landscape. Also since my world is kind of big, it would be quite performance heavy to keep the whole landscape in high quality in memory.
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I divide my heightmap into rectangular levels, create the landscapes for each level, stitch them together using world composition and blend in a lowpoly landscape for distant rendering of the terrain. This seems more reasonable, but the problem is the high and low detail version of the terrain would not be in sync. I could make huge changes on a level landscape which is not reflected on the low detail version, so I’d have to painstakingly sync those. Also it seems the editor is not able to edit 2 landscapes simultaneously. So when I paint over the edge of one terrain I#d have to edit the second to fit the edge of the first.
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I use one big terrain, but use the “move to level” tool to copy parts of the terrain to the specific level. This mixture of 1) and 2) seems like the right approach, however the size of the components that can be exported is pretty big. Way to big for my needs. Also I might run into the same kind of problems like in 1) and 2)
I’m not an expert in UE4 but given the powerful landscape and world composition tools it seems like I should be able to achieve this kind of layout. I hope you can give me any advice on a possible implementation or how I could alter my layout to achieve something similar.