Open world design and mesh density

News & General Discussion
1

I’m think about creating large terrain area but I don’t know how to convey borders of the world becuase player could step off the terrain and fall of.

I thought that the best would be place mountains around the borders. I’ve made an mountain with 4052 polygons. Now if I place them around the borders, this would be like 12 mountains.

Now, there would be also some assets around

  • Is this OK for having optimize terrain?

  • How to prevent using additional terrains? When I snap 2 terrains next each other, there are visible seams.

  • Is there better off to hide the borders of the terrain ?

  • How to make better open world level ?

2

Make a prototype for your target platform, test and measure, then adjust.

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3

use prop clutter to hide seams. Or buildings. Or trees. Or hills. Or mountains. Or streams. Or bushes. Or fences.

You know, just whatever makes sense to be there and communicates to player that its the ends of the map. Just look at any open world game. Fallout or Elder Scrolls are good examples. I wouldn’t stress about a perfectly realistic and seamless boundaries. If your game aint sixty dollars with a name everybody knows on the cover, as long as there is clear communication in the game world and player doesn’t get surprised or have to guess at what the rules are you’ll probably be fine.

Make your mountain or other background pieces with as much resolution as you need to hit the look you desire. Then LOD as necessary.

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4

Could you use a Unity Terrain rather than a mountain mesh? The neat thing about the terrain tool is that it auto-LODs its mesh depending on where you’re standing. If you can’t or don’t want to use that, you can set up your mountain mesh to use LODs of its own, so that it’s not always thousands of tris.

Aside from that, do what the others have said. Test it on your target device and modify as necessary, and use any in-world clutter that makes sense to communicate boundaries to the player.

Communicating boundaries is an important part of game design. If you do it well enough players won’t even notice, but it’s not terrible if they do. Also consider that you can use natural barriers that the player usually just wouldn’t want to travel into - rough terrain, dense forrest, wide rivers, cliffs - and then use an invisible wall for people who try anyway.

Depending on the type of game, you could also have the character react if you go past the boundary. For instance, I believe in The Witcher 3 you can walk past the map’s extents. At first Geralt says something about not wanting to travel in that direction, and if you persist he then turns around and walks back regardless of what buttons you press.

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