Hi all , just want to find out if anyone have any info about work being done on open word maps, so that we have an endless or bigger world map in GG for our games. ?
i am currently working on a new project were the player must survive after a crash landing, but the GG world is not that big for a open world game.
i know it is possible because cybernescence is already doing it.

if this technique is normal , also then can someone tell us more about it, if not then maybe we must pick cybernescence brain or ask him to assist with open world maps


So any info or news would be very nice.

Thanks
Pcs

I've not heard of any official work regarding tiled terrain maps. I am guessing Cybernescence is using objects for the floor rather than the default terrain. If not, then he is probably using a modified version of GG.

I could have missed some new commands of course, if so I will be looking into them at some point down the line

I believe cybernescence uses a custom build of GG which includes many new features including dynamic day-light cycle (with a moving sun and moving shadows to match), colour correction filters, and the aforementioned terrain streaming.

AE

DVader and Avenging Eagle thanks for the feedback. lets hope someone is busy with it somewhere . lol

Currently GG is not particularly suitable for open world projects.

What happened to your last project? Did you release it or is it on hold?

No, not if you want something in comparison to many AAA open world games out there. GG's memory and speed restrictions will cause issues unfortunately. Even if we get terrain tiling in GG, there would still be the memory limit as far as populating it goes. We would need some way of having objects load in on the fly and be deleted when not needed as well to have any chance. I don't see that coming anytime soon...

Hi Wolf, my last project is currently on hold.
when i started with my W.I.P Guns of solo , i started it when i had enough material to work on and to displayed. I started off with my oil rig map, and at time i already had 6 other maps basically ready at 75% build for my game, i post some pictures early in my w i p of the maps.
https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/219402?page=1#msg2597281
Also i added and extra level to start the game off , because the story line had to make sense for the player to get to the oil rig.
at that point i made some stand alone tests to see how it will look and had some problems again
https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/220057#msg2605685
this time with texture not being carried over to the models. i then also realized that users complained about GG not capable of handling more than +- four maps. so at this point for my game i have 8 maps. ( harbor, oil rig, extraction, main town, the hospital , underground bunker, army camp, space station.)
So i have decided to put it on hold to see how things will turn out with the memory problems with to many maps and also the texture problems.

So currently i have been busy with a new project , a survival game witch will play of on only one map. this is why i have asked the question about the open world maps. so far i am busy with my players base and things really looks promising.

The terrain chunking (calling it that as it definitely isn’t streaming in the way most people think about it) mods I’ve done to GG allows different pre-built GG terrains to be imported into the same level during game. There is no tiling logic yet that says you are getting near to a border so load in the next appropriate terrain tile and indeed to do this the terrains themselves would need to have their borders to fit seamlessly (not a small task).

However for Cogwheel Chronicles this current approach will likely be good enough as the game is based around airship, biplane, submarine travel etc - i.e. I can have a lot of ocean in between the discrete GG terrains - and these terrains are made to be islands so they always have water surrounding all borders.

Even to do this was a lot of work, wasn’t just the unloading and loading of terrains it involves moving the terrains away from the default 0,0 world position which means rebuilding the underlying collision, moving the shadow bounding box for the world and working out how to procedurally place trees and other game play entities on the new terrain and location (and dozens of other tweaks ). Interestingly it also allows terrain to be moved up and down so can have flying island terrain and Atlantis undersea type approaches (course this can be done by changing water level too)

A lot of other changes also needed to allow correct player control and to make the sea and cloud levels to be much larger and move to where player is (required shader and engine updates). Quite a long list of knock on effects had to be tackled.

Honestly it will take a black belt like Lee to get ‘proper’ streaming in I think and even knowing GG is his baby and how great at this he is, it will be no small task.

And for us users it would still be a daunting task to create, populate and control these terrains - not a feature for the casual user in my view.

I’ve said before I’ll release all the GG mods once Cogwheel has shipped and Lee can take a view on what if anything he wants to add to main build.

Edit: if some of this comes across as a shameless plug for my game Cogwheel Chronicles then it kind of was as needing to start building up some ‘noise’ about it

Cheers.

Shameless plug accepted. You do some amazing things with the engine.

Keep up the great work and good luck with your game.

cybernescence, i fully agree with Pirate Myke. your work is of a very high standard. we all could learn from you.

i have been thinking, in my case even if the existing word that we have now could somehow just be hard coded to be a bit bigger as it is now it would already help a lot , maybe even for some other users as well.

Lee if you are reading this maybe i don't know, but in my opinion what would be supper cool is if one can build lets say a complete base and then block selected the hole area around your base even parts of the terrain and then copied it to another place in the map and then just smooth out the terrain were you have paste your base. this will be a great advantage if we have that kind of method to copy, because if then one day we have the function of lets say a bigger world then the user does not need to rebuild all the entities that was on the original map he can then just block select and move or copy the hole area to the new space and still have the sculpture effect of the terrain around his base or house or what ever he has build.

ps ( if this could happen i would be as happy as those naked streakers at the cricket matches. ) lol

At the moment the map size is 768m x 768m, if I remember correctly...
It would be already a big advantage, if we could select at the beginning the map size.
Let’s say, small 768m, medium 2km, large 4km, xl 8km... that would be cool.

Populating a 8 x 8 km map would be a real challenge... lol

Please remember its not just the size of the map the terrain rendering is a huge hog on resources, the only way this would work is if you use your own terrain build it as a model, then you world would be as big as you want, there is a neat little trick to make your world seem bigger just scale your entities right down in size adjust the player camera tweak a few other settings and you have a bigger world, if you scale everything down by 50% you will effectively double the size of your map with the same resources

So what you are saying is, it's not the size that matters but the way you use it

(Sorry, that was too good to miss )

ha ha ha yep that's it basically, you can create the illusion of a bigger map quite easily

Thanks For the good wishes and yes the terrain is a resource hog - there are some performance tweaks for terrain that are currently disabled in GG but they are disabled for a reason I’ve found in that they don’t work . I’m hoping to repair these too (quad reduction for flat areas and quad and collision removal below sea level).
Some terrain load time can be improved a little too.

Other terrain options looking at is different procedures for random terrains other than the default (resurrecting a diamond square approach - not the one in the GG source now that is disabled). There are some pretty cool algorithms now for first cut random terrains - at the moment we can import height maps with a bit of manual effort which can be procedurally created but some in game options to create more styles of terrain would be cool. I’ve gone a bit off topic.

Cheers.

I started something a few years ago, I built a map outside of GG in Sketchup it all worked very well the only issue I had was the water height which now can be controlled so I may revisit this I manged to get up to 10 of these on the map with no fps loss and just extended them off the edge of the terrain it took a good 20 - 30 mins to walk right to the end lol, the hills were quite easy to create, I am more knowledgeable now so they could be better

looks very interesting , very nice

That was my thought in my earlier post Graphix, nice to see it works in practise I've done similar in Dark Basic many years ago but never tried in GG.

As a quick test, and something I'll definitely come back to given the result, I changed GG to create a terrain 4 times the normal default (so large you can't see it all in editor at max scroll out).

A little counter intuitively for me at first thought, the FPS was a rock solid 60 (stays stable not like stock size) and terrain feels huge walking/running around it (generated using a new algo for random terrains - so definitely not just large & flat). To make it properly useable there would be other things to tackle (texture tiling, terrain editing and such) as other GG parameters are built around the stock terrain size.

Interesting first experiment though

Cheers.

interisting, wish i had your skills. lol

Just tried 8x and FPS on empty random map is down to 15. Also some quad gaps in terrain appearing at 8x.

So superficially there is potentially a sweet spot in there between ~4x and 8x larger than the GG terrains we currently have.

Obviously would take lots more work testing, experimentation etc. to check more, but still an interesting project

Cheers.

Very interesting.

But what would the FPS be if that area were totally populated with entities!

Btw, didn't Lee promise a terrain-less option in the next update?

@AmenMoses yes i think you are correct i also recall something like that, that he said.

@AM - A lot less no doubt (probably dire) - all I was saying was that on an empty random map, the FPS was similar and I wasn't expecting it to be so - an area 16 times the current stock terrain. I'd be surprised if it could cope with a lot of entities too, however for driving type games it might be OK where the terrain and its shape is the main 'entity' ?

Really it needs much more experimentation

Perhaps I can try terrain-less now and see if that makes any difference - I know it was to avoid collision for space type games, but might also improve FPS without any terrain collision being built and managed even when not rendered.

Cheers.

It would be great if we can have a larger terrain, lod is working rather well, when i move away from entities i see an increase in fps.
Also, the Tool which Preben has made would be a big help to reduce draw calls, hopefully it will be ported to GG soon.

I can see no appreciable difference in FPS when using a terrain scale setting that is twice the GG default (i.e. gives four times the stock GG terrain area). I added a 1,000 randomly placed trees and still good.

Not sure the screen shots do justice to how big the terrain now feels at 4 times the size, but certainly good enough for island terrains. Think I'll stick with this size for now and keep testing.

Thanks PCS for starting the conversation on this, made me try harder with this aspect





Cheers.

@cybernescence , its no problem, as long as maybe we could also benefit of it one day, then i am happy.

@cybernescence, i want to as you a question, with this technique of yours, is it possible to extend a map on witch i have already started to build a base on, with out changing the existing map. ?

@PCS changing the terrain scaling in the way outlined above will 'stretch' any existing maps across 4 times the surface area. Any entities placed will be in the same position, i.e. not correct in relation to the previous terrain. One of the tricky parts when changing things for others is trying to keep backward compatibility. Will need more work to allow entities and terrain updates across this larger terrain as the IDE is configured to match the screen mouse movements to the stock terrain size.

Cheers.

ok , sounds to bad for me. lol

That would make it somewhere around 2,6x2,6 km if i'm correct.
For my project it would mean enough space around the fortified town to build farmland, forest and open water in order to really make it an open world through which the player can travel.

cybernescence, if you say stretch, how does the terrain texture looks when you look at it, still ok or ?

It’s just the height points of the saved map that are allocated across the larger surface area - the terrain is texture tiled as before and this can be adjusted. The collision works fine too - didn’t have to change that the way Lee coded it works for the larger surface area also.

I’m still testing. I’ll try on a different machine and see if I get a different impact.

Cheers.

You also have to calculate in the "perceived terrain size" vs. the actual one. It`s basic psychology, but human minds, especially when watching a movie and even more when consuming a game, this perception gets skewed. We experience travel distances between points of interest much longer and extensive than they actually are.

Not only in games, in movies a 5 minutes in-car scene is perceived as a hundred miles road trip easily.

Same goes with locations themselves:

A city barely large enough to inhabit a population of 100.000 in terms of buildings, where almost everything is accessible to the player, appears like a multi-million metropolitan area. In even the largest towns in open world medieval RPGs would sooner or later run into heavy incest-related genetic problems.

Antinomy world test was a basic, maxed out GG map, and people perceived it like a 5 - 8 square kilometer monster. When I asked the playtesters on Father Island, how long they felt it had taken them or would take them to get from one end of the Island to another in a straight go for it, the answers were between 10 and 20 minutes - and the reality more between 3 and 4.

So we can achieve the illusion of a large location already. However, what cybernescence can achieve with his approach, is truly the illusion of wast WORLD to explore.

@Ertlov - that's interesting stuff to keep in mind - thanks.

For anyone interested I've now tested 6x (linear) standard map size - this is 36 times the area of stock map - I still get vsynced 60 fps for the vast majority of the map (GTX750Ti). It's just too big to walk/run through, so am also flying around in a bi-plane and it looks pretty stunning from a terrain texturing point of view at ground and elevated levels.

Clearly this is an unpopulated map and is largely impractical for most games, just too big to cope with without a lot of other cunning mechanisms to populate it for interest and game play.

But does show the capability of GG when pushed - the quad tree terrain code is sublime - LOD transitions work really well still and the collision/physics code that supports the visual terrain is amazing too. Might try 100x area just to see

Cheers.

That is quite an accomplishment Cyber.

It will be a nice challenge to build on such a large map.

@cybernescence can you please upload somewhere modified exe gameguru with larger map ?

cybernescence that sounds great

Wow. That is sounding like a great improvement.

Just a question to spark some life back into this one as I've been playing with larger maps as with cybernescence mainly using aircraft as with walking you are limited to the terrain size in saying that though if we could be able to extend this to say 6x or whatever and then disable it couldn't we use our .x map overlaid to increase any fps drop via placement of other models? or is there any way to just disable the terrain collision so we can actually walk past these boundaries?