What would be an adequate terrain resolution for an open world Game? I’ve been playing around with the resolution size and setting it to a very high resolution like 4000x4000. I’ve found that it takes me around 10 mins to get from one end of the 4000x4000 terrain to the other. Do I want to make it bigger or do I want to focus on sculpting the terrain out more making it a bit harder to difficult?
Depends on the type of game.
Do you wan’t large expansive terrains or smaller ones with more detail? If you wan’t large levels but with lots of detail you can use multiple smaller terrains and script a system that loads/deloads terrains as you cross them
You’re gonna have performance problems with an OpenWorld terrain, in case you want to populate it.
You could create a terrain matrix, tiling them, and turning them on/off depending of your player’s position. This way, your only limit is psysical memory and not performance.
If you are making a golf game for example, the collision model gets crappier the farther apart the terrain ‘pixels’ are, so a tiled map with a higher resolution might be more appropriate if the terrain physics plays an important part of your game.
I want a bit of both. I want a mix of rugged but Managable terrain. I want something that isn’t too difficult to traverse but not too easy to traverse either. What would you suggest I do?
For that you will need to create a bunch of smaller terrains with a higher resolution to get the detail needed for ruggedness and then use a system to load/deload as you traverse terrain, there are systems to do this on the asset store. To create ruggedness whilst maintaining playability I would say create your terrain, put down a first person controller on one side of the map and walk to the other side using the most logical path as a player, no a developer. Take that route and then smooth it out into more of a path. Do this multiple times and eventually you will have a system of paths running across your terrain whilst the rest of the terrain stays rugged. Although this may take a while to do it is doing it this way, from the players perspective, will of course increase playability
This is pretty obvious advice, but seriously just try something. Try the different resolutions and sizes until you get the largest possible resolution to get the level of detail that you want, or is comfortable to work with. You know better than anyone what you want. And, as has been mentioned, you’ll do really well to load several small terrains in and out because one large one (ESPECIALLY if it’s populated with props) is going to eat your CPU up.
Good luck with your game, too. Open-ended games are a real challenge and you’re definitely going to learn a lot from this!