Game updates from sleep me [who is smarter than awake me by some annoying margin]
My main map is fully loaded as sub-maps into the engine!
And [as of thinking about it all night in my sleep/dreams] I’ve decided I’m probably doing it in a completely different way!
Which means starting over!
But this is cool. See the problem isn’t the method itself. That worked fine...
The issue is that I want to create the illusion of a “round” map... Like for realism and simplicity’s sake I want it to effectively feel like a tiny planet and when you go off the map in one direction, you come back to it on the opposite side... and I’m not sold that I’ll be able to do this effectively with level streaming on a flat map.
My idea was to put “copies” of various parts of the sub-map or “sub-levels” in more than one place and have the engine move the user back to the first “copy” of that specific sub-level, when they reached the next one over on the map... but this does mean having my map effectively twice the size it needs to be [which may or may not affect resources or storage space needed, and might create a complex system of invisible volumes --which are used to recognize where the player is], and as far as creating day and night cycles go... which I also want to do... It’s just starting to make more sense to make my map as a globe [the way I first conceptualized but wrote-off as more complicated than I needed to make it]... I also see now that the engine will treat whatever mesh I want it to as basically the “floor”... so there’s that.
SO.... If I pull out Blender, and am able to make my map there, and divide it the way I need to for level streaming... I’ll be remaking it like that.
As of working in the engine a bit I’m seeing that my next steps include:
-Making my own sky-box:
so I have better control of the atmosphere and when it’s visible [or at least modifying the behaviour of the default one]. This means fully delving into how sky boxes work and what their component parts are [handled by blue-prints]. Which also ties into me making my own weather... which might be complicated by a “round” map... [rain can’t just fall it has to “fall” towards the center of the map]
-Making my own “materials” aka surface textures:
I’ve noted there is a whole window to do this in the engine that works with blueprints and I would rather pick apart how these things are put together and make all of my own from scratch. The engine will handle “the way things are handled” in a way that makes a nicely realistic looking game, but what will really add to the realism and the uniqueness is having really nice looking, detailed and unique/original textures. [And this and the level streaming and associated volumes will give me an opportunity to work with “blue-prints” while accomplishing something useful for my end product].
I’m still going to be using Photo-shop and .png height-maps for any smaller or “flat” level I need to make [at least for the main terrain], because it’s WAY simpler, and fast and effective. And I’ll still put up a basic tutorial on it... I’m just going in a different direction with my main map [I think, if I can’t divide the mesh well in Blender or have it load at the size I want in the engine, I’ll just go back to my flat map and fudge it with level streaming] The map effectively needs to be many separate objects, as many separate and evenly divided objects as I need it divided into for level streaming to work well in bringing down the required processing power... Not just because of the final product, but because of the way the system I am on is struggling to keep up.