Unlimited world size in Unity3d (by a trick) & maximum speed?

Questions & Answers
1

Hello,

I am thinking about possibilities of making a huge world (we will ignore memory limitations). It may be city or cities + terrain and roads, or it may even be a space with several real size planets (more - less like Earth in size). So I am talking about the open world much larger than 10x10km defined by the floating point.

I have a couple of theoretical ideas of going around that limit, but as a total beginner in Unity3d and C# I need to ask can these ideas actually work well, so that it feels 100% natural and with good physics.

  • moving and rotating the world instead of the character, vehicle or flying machine.

This means that whenever and however you go, you would actually be in 0,0,0 coordinate, and the destination would come to you. So the movement would be simulated. I guess that it might be done with applying a bunch of script lines to any map object (and the rest of the map + environment would be linked to it) regarding of speed / handling of every single vehicle or character you manipulate with.

But even if this is all possible, I don’t know what would happen when the scripted map object gets outside of 10x10km, and how would bouncing, deflections and physics in general behave comparing to the standard scripting.

  • this one I saw that somebody already tried / did - the world would be static until you come close to 10x10km border. Than everything in the game together (character / vehicle too) would rotate 180 deg. so the 0,0,0 on the map would be outside of 10km and you would just go without noticing anything. Rotation would happen whenever you touch that border (which should be defined / scripted somehow).

  • I guess there is also a possibility of “cheating” with multiple worlds / scenes, but seems to me it would be more complicated and it would be impossible to implement well on really big and continuous world.

I would also like to know what is the maximum possible speed in Unity3d.

thanks.

2

From what I understand, what you are trying to do is absolutely possible. But you must know it will take more than basic knowledge to not only complete but also set up a blueprint of how the engine will work. But I’m sure you’re more than capable of getting a nice road map out. I would advise taking a look at this thread: link text

It covers precedural generation, world shifting methods, mesh deformation, and more. It should give you enough information to at least have an idea of what you’re attempting.