Hi,
i just wanted to know if it is possible to create a vast open world with unity3 , like red dead redemption style open world.
To this would it be better to create the landscape with Autodesk maya and Autodesk mudbox, or just create it with the built-in terrain.
When playing rdr , i’ve noticed that the terrain there couldn’t be made with a built-in terrain engine , but more like sculpted in maya and mudbox.
PS: i have unity pro
It sounds possible in theory, but you’ll have to build or find some pretty complicated content streaming and culling utilities on your own.
Unity can stream levels in, but I’m fairly sure that Unity doesn’t have any automated mechanism to stream out levels. You’ll have to figure out a solution for that on your own. If you can get away with loading all of your content at once, that’s easy, but I doubt it’s a realistic option for any game of appreciable size.
Scripts can be another thing. It’s simply not practical to simulate an entire world at once. You’ll need to find some way to keep your scripts very simple, or fake global simulation through some clever mix of spawning, culling, sleeping, and pooling resources. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution for this.
Aside from that, most game engines will start encountering serious glitches as gameplay moves extremely far away from the origin. If your world is big enough for that to be an issue, you’ll have to deal with that.
If you plan on deploying to anything other than high-octane PCs, you’ll get to deal with all sorts of exciting platform limits.
Possible? Of course. Easy? Not at all. There’s a reason RDR won the Best Technology award at last year’s GDC.