Now, before you get all angry at me assuming my intent is to make a gigantic MMORPG, it is not. This is merely a question of wonderment.
I was playing Skyrim, and noticed that a lot of it was all one big level, obviously the entire plain of the land is one giant terrain, but also a lot of the cities, or ‘holds’ were also part of this. So, with the exception of the bigger cities, and the dungeons. How conceivable is something that size to make in Unity, as a single scene? Would runtime start to get incredibly laggy, or would the program just start to slow down and sacrifice functionality? Or would it run just as smooth as ever? Is Unity built to create something to gargantuan? All of this alongside the other levels; dungeons, giant underground tunnels, cities. And with quite incredible detail.
So really my question is, how possible is it to recreate such a huge scene in unity?
This question really has nothing to do with Unity. Open world is generally an illusion. Skyrim loads pieces as you travel. Have you ever noticed why theres a loading screen when you fast travel? This is because you have instantly moved to a new location, therefore there are hundreds of objects that need to be loaded off the hardrive. But when you slowly walk around, its able to run smoothly only needing to load a few objects per second at most. Most of what you see in the distances is very undetailed objects in the place of what will eventually be there…
Of course Unity is capable of this. But it would require alot of programming to create efficient systems to dynamically load and destroy objects.
EDIT: That being said, I am actually working on an open world editor right now. I may release it on the asset store someday.
Yes, but it wouldn’t be easy. Probably have to do a lot of asset streaming and asynchronous loading of major sections as well as the default Unity optimization stuff (LOD, occlusion culling etc). But that’s almost a moot point, as Unity isn’t really meant for gigantic games like that, but for small to mid size games. I can’t ever see a situation where anyone would use Unity for that level of game.
Making Skyrim terrain is easy: Make a terrain and set the resolution to 20,000 on x and z, then use the tool to make your mountains and stuff. DONE!!
The other Skyrim stuff, eh, I dunno, I don’t want to think about the coding.
Also, if you have the coin(see what I did there?) you can buy extension assets that can make development easier. Such as AI packages, procedural terrain, RPG kits and much more!!
I think it’s possible, but I wouldn’t even know how well it would run or how it could be optimized.
Thing is with the effort it’d take such big project, and the people involved to do the art, sounds, etc, you might as well also hire programmers to do your own engine optimized to run such demanding game, right? :-0
if it is just the scene it can be done but i have doubts about the whole game. i think even the bethesda team will have hard times making skyrim with unity without the source code.
Hrm. While it may be possible to get something working, you’d pretty much have to throw out everything in Unity in favour of custom or third party solutions. Major issues would be pathfinding, cross-boundary AI, async load times, occlusion culling ( I don’t believe you can use umbra for open world as its scene-wide only baking ), memory management, floating-point accuracy and content-updating. Sure something is possible, but without Unity source code I’d wager it would be incredibly difficult verging on impossible to produce anything of meaningful commercial quality. Anything requiring long periods of smooth uninterrupted gameplay where all of the world cannot exist in memory at the same time is definitely not Unity’s forte. I’d go so far as to say you’d be unable to find a Unity-based commercial MMO or RPG that used a true open world design, favoring a zone/scene based approach instead because of these constraints ( note: space games don’t count due to lack of terrain ).
New devs should avoid being fooled by illusions of grand scale artwork; artwork is not the issue ( apart from the production workflow being fairly specific to support async loading ), writing systems that perform is.
Iam also looking at this issue for a flight sim type of project and you seem to know well what unity engine limitations are. So would you suggest an engine that has an area based terrain system such as Esenthel for those types of projects ?
Sorry I don’t have up-to-date experience with other engines as we committed to the Unity engine two years ago, so I couldn’t make an informed recommendation. Being air-based, some of the issues may not be relevant ( e.g. high granularity ground-based pathfinding ) and your project may be achievable using Unity. My only advice would be to identify and tackle the difficult challenges as part of technical due diligence when assessing engines.
The Grit Engine is made for lage streamable open worlds (it has automatic asset streaming implemented at his core). While Grit lacks some of the candy features Unity offers, it already does a better job on that side. It’s also open source and free.