How much do you think I can load into the level and still have it run well?

Development World Creation
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hello,
i want to create a level with just an insane amount of stuff in it. basically a deep jungle/garden in a huge landscape. hundreds of meshes, each ranging from 1k-100k polys. each with 2 UV maps, 512 lightmap, etc…
my question is, is with the recommended ram/video/card processor in the ue4 FAQs, how much do you think i can load into the level and still have it run well? it will be experienced in VR so it needs to run very smooth.

is there anything recommended that i could do to still make it look crowded and dense but not use so many polys?

thanks for any guidance!

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Hi TreeByKooba,

You’ve got a fairly broad question here in the sense of how exactly to go about this. So some of my answer will be broad strokes that will require testing and research on your end to get the look and feel of the game you want to design and build.

It’s certainly possible to have a densely populated world with your assets. The key things you’ll want to do to accomplish this is have separate LODS set up for your assets, make use of Culling Volumes, and potentially use Level Streaming depending if that fits your needs. We have examples of all of these within our Content Examples project from Marketplace. I would also not recommend using 512 lightmap on every object within your game. I would adjust this according to the size of the model. (ie. if you’ve got a small object it wouldn’t need a 512 lightmap. Something like 16-32 should work well, maybe 64 if you’ve really got to)

Also, be sure to check out the Forums as this topic would be better suited for a discussion there rather than a single answer.

Thank you!

Tim

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actually that’s exactly the stuff i wanted to know! thanks so much. gives me some things to google. just didn’t know the vocab for all of those things.