Why is a regular landscape 2x faster than a tiled landscape?

Development World Creation
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1

hi there,

I want to set up a landscape for an openworld level. it’s for multiplayer so the obvious benefits of a tiled landscape won’t be very relevant, but at least I like the idea of tiled landscapes because of ease of use in a team dev environment.

so I set up a 6x6km tiled landscape, but the performance was very disappointing. I load up my tiled landscape, stand in one hill in the corner of the level, and see diagonally through the land. a mere ~36 FPS.

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but I knew something wasn’t right, so I set up a very similar 6x6km regular (not tiled) landscape, stand in one hill in the corner of the level, and see diagonally through the land. and I get ~80 FPS.

44100-elandnontiled.jpg
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…

after some investigation I came to realize the LOD isn’t acting the same. the LOD settings are the same, but for the tiled landscape the LOD system only reduces so much…

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but the regular non-tiled landscape LOD reduces much more, down to one polygon per landscape component

44113-elandnontiled2.jpg
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doesn’t matter what I try with the tiled landscape (played with LOD levels and factors), I cannot get it to reduce as much, and the performance is just terrible

…

is this a known issue? something waiting to be fixed perhaps?

cause at the moment for me tiled landscapes are just unusable.

I know I could manually do the process of selecting components and moving them to a different level, but at the moment I’m only iterating through setups from WM. the automatic way of making levels from tiles is so much better.

I’m on 4.8 preview 3 btw.

cheers

2

turns out that tiled landscapes have much more components.

the LOD does allow them to go down to one quad per component. it’s just that the components are so small, that even when the LOD reaches one quad per component it’s still extremely dense.

I tried the different settings for importing tiled landscapes, to no avail. with one setup I even got the components to never go below 4 quads (Components: 8x8, sections: 2x2, Quads: 63x63)

it’s still a huge amount of components which prevents proper ‘agressive’ distance LOD

3

hello Epic,

any info on this?

regards, Chosker

4

maybe it’s simply that your tiles are too big, check this thread and see if anything there is helpful: https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?17504-World-Browser-and-massive-tiled-landscapes

5

hello Epic,

any info on this?

@Paaatreeeck: smaller tiles would just mean even less agressive LOD. having more polygons is hardly gonna solve it :confused:

6

Just saw this on forums, copying my response from there:

I just checked this:

Normal landscape: http://i.imgur.com/dIueBwW.png

Tiled landscape: http://i.imgur.com/oH8dzxR.png

Normal landscape size: 8161x8161 256 components

Tiled landscape size: 2041x2041 16 in total end up being 8164x8164, 16 components per landscape 256 components in total, same as regular single piece landscape.

Done testing in 4.10.4, but have to point out it is consistent with my previous experience.