How To Make A Massive Open World Map In Unreal Engine 5

hello bakers and welcome to upside down today we are gonna be checking how to create a massive open world map inside unreal engine 5. a while ago i made a video on the topic of how to create a massive open world map inside unreal engine 4 and today we are going to check what are the differences and what are the changes that epic made to unreal 5. without further ado let's roll the intro [Music] what you see at the moment is uh just a basic template that i did from unreal so i just created a standard project with the third person template inside and as well i click to have the starter content so that we have some things that we can import the first thing we are going to do to start our open world map is to go to file and after that new level and here you are going to see that we have a couple of different options this is similar to the menu that we had before where you can start from some of the template maps but now we have an open world map as well which by default will have most of the things enabled and there will be just like some small changes that we'll need to tweak so i'm just going to select it and click create this is how the map should look like once you have everything loaded and the first thing that we need to check is if our world partitions are enabled this is the system that epic have changed from war composition so before we had the word composition where we had different segments and different parts of the map and we were loading them depending on the settings and now it's called world partition and it's very similar to how our composition was working but there are some small differences so how to check this uh this is something that uh if you're taking the project from adrian four to five you will definitely need to change but if you generally are creating the project inside unreal five it should be by default turned on so we ought to edit and then to project settings and here we can type world partition and work partition you need to make sure that you have this stick turned on if not you need to enable it in order for the next steps to work now that this is something which is enabled we can go to the top called world partition if you don't have this tab you can find it in window and then work partition and here you have world partition editor and as well data layers outliner we're gonna need both of these because in a second we are going to look what exactly the data layers are doing now let's see the word partition so if i select it you will be presented with a map with different sections each of these sections is a segment on its own and if we would like to load all the content in there we can just select all the cells or just one cell right click load selected cells or unlock all cells or unload only the selected ones if you're just beginning your project it will be easy to plot everything since there is not a lot of content but the moment that you're starting to put more and more data you might want to unload some of them in order to have better performance each of these cells represent the roughly the grid of how exactly your world is going to be splitted and how exactly after that things are gonna be loaded and we can tweak the settings for all of this in terms of how big are the cells and as well when exactly they should be loaded or not loaded how we're gonna do this is going by world settings and then there is a section called world partition here we need to have the enabled streaming and uh in order to see the grid inside the viewport and have a little bit better understanding of where exactly these segments are there is this section over here called runtime settings grids and on the bottom you have preview grids if we enable it we are now going to see these white lines which represent where are the cells and how big they are then we have on the settings up here we have the cell size and as well the loading range so these are two things that we need to tweak in order to get the best performance and to set it up for the project that we are working on so uh the cell size by default you can see that this cells i would say that they're very big of course you can drop just a character inside and see how big they are but to help you a little bit to understand this and to help you a little bit uh plan it for your project i would uh think initially like when i make my level designs how much content i would like to have in each of the cells for example if you're doing a more nature open world game where you have more trees mountains and all this kind of stuff and not that many structures and then characters are running around there are some monsters that are spawning or enemies and everything in that case i would probably keep the cells a little bit bigger because having smaller cells means that you will be loading more often information in and out from the memory and having bigger size this will happen uh not as often but uh having bigger sales means that you load bigger chunks so for example if your game is a game that you are playing in a city like an open world game in the city then i would probably uh prefer to work with smaller cells and let's see for example if i make it something like that it will be kind of half of the size of the previous ones so uh i would prefer to work with smaller cells when doing so content packed games like for example and areas like cities or if you have like some bigger structures and a lot a lot more elements because this way you will better manage the information that is being loaded and unreal will better manage uh what exactly to display on the screen and just will have a lot better performance then the other thing is about the range uh loading distance so in order to uh tell you how exactly this works i will just zoom out a little bit like this and get my snipping tool just to make a small drawing so for example if we are over here our character is bound over here and then we have our filter view like this this uh range of uh how far everything is being loaded is going to load all the cells that are partially visible or visible inside this this range and then it will load it all the way to this distance so for example if this number is somewhere over here so this cell is going to be like the last one that it's loaded of course like this one here and this one here but then everything uh which goes beyond that point it will not be loaded so this is how the distance works have in mind that there are some issues that i encountered in some of my uh projects that i worked on and this is like for example if you have some objects which are with very huge boundary books that go uh let's say on couple of cells and it's mostly is happening let's say if you have some uh smaller cell size and then you have some huge structures in your game so if you have something like this uh the boundary box of this object will be loaded so this means that the cell itself as well will be loaded and so on and so on so uh have in mind uh all of this when you're designing your levels and when you're making your gameplay design and how everything will be happening on the level basically so uh knowing this you need to take into consideration the cell size based on the amount of content and as well the range how far you would like the players to be able to see and how far you will actually need for the game to load now let's talk about the content and adding uh all the things inside your scene so if i i'll just grab a box over here in one of the cells and let's scale it a little bit let's say that this is uh a building that i would like to have or some sort of structure i would like to have in my game and at the moment this uh box itself is not in any particular layer it's something which is just being loaded inside the level and what do i mean by that let's go into data layers and see that like we don't have anything in the list i mentioned earlier that unreal they changed the system from the world composition to world partition and data layers is probably the biggest change and also how assets are being loaded what do i mean by how assets are being loaded and how information is being stored before we had the following system so if this level uh i'm let's say going to save it so we're just going to save it and i'll name it level zero two so this means that now i have level zero two and uh before how people were working with the world composition was to have a main level which was the container for all the other sub levels and then having like each of the sub levels with different things so we can have one sub level with buildings one with vfx's one with vegetation and all these kind of elements so uh this was done because uh the information in unreal four was stored inside each of the levels so all the assets like this asset at the moment this information was stored inside the level what does this mean this means that if i am editing let's say we work as a team with couple of other people to develop a game and i have some of the levels that i'm working on so we use some sort of a source control like perforce or something else and if i have the levels that i'm working on no one else will be able to work inside that level so this means that all the data which is put for example inside the sub-level buildings will be edited just by me andrew 5 an epic took a completely different approach on this so at the moment we have the level zero two which i just saved which is our container and then each of the assets that we are placing inside is a change on its own so it doesn't interfere anyhow with uh me uh and the need of having other sub-levels so we all were working in the same level and then each of the assets is an individual entity that is being added to the game of course this uh again requires a little bit of coordination uh especially when you get to zones that uh both people like the transition zones and uh you need to coordinate this with your team and the rest of the people that are working on the project but overall it's a much better and nicer system to work with i think it's uh very beneficial for uh the overall development of bigger projects so uh what does this mean as well for the files and how everything is being submitted the thing is that before when we were submitting a file and we have uh for example level with the buildings and then we have a lot of data inside that file it was a very huge chunk of information that is being submitted every time through the server or is being saved on every time so now when the information for the assets is stored by itself then we no longer have those huge submits but instead we have other very small but a lot of small submits uh to our project so what you will see is that uh instead of uh submitting for example a file which is uh 20 or 30 megabytes or even more uh instead of doing something like that you will be actually submitting uh the same amount of data if you make a lot of changes like the same amount of size in terms of data but uh split it into small chunks of course how many chunks it depends of how many changes you did to the level uh now let's talk about the data layers so data layers is a way to kind of organize everything and also one more layer of way how you can optimize and further improve the performance so as i said this uh cube that i did at the moment which will represent the building that we have uh it's uh going to be a building in the game and it's placed inside the level zero two that we just saved it doesn't have any group any layer any partition it's just inside that level and inside this section of our word partition so what can we do in order to improve the loadings and everything that's happening uh we can create a new data layer so i'm just going to create a new data layer by right clicking uh somewhere here into the empty space and i'll call this building zero one so now we have building zero one if i hide it and unhide it you will see that nothing is happening this is because we don't have our asset inside that layer how to place it there is we need to select it then we need to have selected the layer that we would like to place the asset inside right click and add selected actor to selected data layer now when we have the asset selected you will see that this layer is highlighted with blue color which means that the acid is part of this group over here and if we hide it and unhide it we will of course hide only this asset from the scene now what we can do is let's say we want to add more things uh if i would like to copy or duplicate the box the building that we have by holding alt and just drag it on the site you will see that now this building is also inside this data layer so if i hide it it automatically uh already recognizes that it needs to be in the same but uh if we want to change it let's say that this is a building two and this is building one and we would like to to split them we can do this very easily by creating a new data layer we call it building 0 2 and now we can right click and add selected actor to selected data layer now there is one thing that i would like you to notice and this if i hide now this you will see that nothing is happening and if i hide this also you see that only this one is being hided this is because if i deselect the layers over here and just select the second building you will see that both of the data layers are highlighted this means that this building at the moment exists as information both in building zero one and zero two so we need to remove it from zero one in order for this building to be on its own this is done by right-clicking and then remove select detector from selected data layer now it will be only uh the building 0 2 highlighted and if i hide it i'm hiding this one and the other one so this is uh the way how you add remove and uh create new data layers what else we can do with the data layers is uh we can create sub-levels so for example let's say in that building we starting to add some furniture so building one we can create new data layer and i'm going to name this furniture and then i'm going to drag it on top of building one and you can see that it goes a little bit uh more to the inside and this means that the furniture is part of our buildings but the building is the parent and the furniture is a child structure from this building one and if we hide this uh element it will hide everything which is uh under this error here but we can also hide some of the charts from the whole structure so let's uh right click and add this chair to the correct layer of furniture and you can see we can hide just the furniture or we can hide both so why this is great and why this is very important uh as i mentioned earlier if you're building bigger cities you will have a lot more assets especially if you would like to have interiors for all these buildings so what you can do in order to further optimize not only to have this partition from the world like not only to have this segment which you're loading and then let's say everything else that you are unloading but also if you are outside your buildings you can load everything but hide all the furniture assets by creating some blueprints or if we go inside let's say building one we can just unhide all the furnitures from that building but hide all the other buildings that are around it this improves further the optimization for the project if this is a topic which is interesting for you leave a comment down below and i'm going to make more videos about the open world topic and as well how you can optimize further your projects thank you for joining me in today's tutorial i hope that this was useful and helpful for you subscribe to the channel and see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Upside Down

Views: 89,046

Keywords: upside down, game art, tutorials, How To Make A Massive Open World Map In Unreal Engine 4, Massive Open World, world composition, world composition unreal engine 4, unreal engine 4, unreal engine 4 tutorial, open world games, open world, open world unreal engine 4, how to, unreal engine, world partition ue5, world partition, world partition unreal engine 5, How To Make A Massive Open World Map In Unreal Engine 5, open world map unreal engine, unreal engine 5, ue5 tutorial, ue5

Id: nyBv0gqwJO0

Length: 17min 56sec (1076 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 21 2022