The biggest problem handling a large landscape in any game engine is memory management.
And if that is extremely difficult in most big engines like Unity or Unreal, is even more difficult in Blender.
One needs very good skills in programming to tackle such an enterprise.
Of course, that if the landscape is a procedural generated one, or if it’s repeated, it’s then fairly easy. But if the landscape is unique everywhere, it’s extremely difficult to do it.
For example, MSFlightSimulator 2020 took more than a decade to be developed, and the biggest bottleneck was the scenary and all the problems of loading and unloading data to the graphic card. (and it’s still not perfect, in any way!)
Choose a large scale engine like UE5 and futureproof your career.
UE5 seems like one of the most problematic engines nowadays. It’s popular simply because of Epic Games reputation but objectively it doesn’t work very well and all games coming out of it have a lot of common issues. Is Morrowind an open-world game? Sure. Can you play Morrowind on Macbook Air or any office laptop with integrated GPU? Yep. Can you play any UE5 game on laptops like that? Definitely not. I couldn’t to run Stalker 2 on RTX 3060 on all the minimal settings and I learned all those issues like shader recompiling, random FPS drops, etc - are common in UE5 games. And if you think you can’t sell game with Morrowind tier graphics nowadays - well, look at games like Dread Delusion. A lot of people definitely appreciate non-photorealistic or even straight retro graphics.
it’s funny how that kind of topic spawns on regular basis on the forum
cosmic newbie : " i WaNt to maKe DrAGOn AGe GTa REdemPtion "
all BGE veterans : fall into the bait and are happy to make dissertation even we all know how it ends
@Max_Newberg : by experience, people asking those question just disappear after 2 days without saying good bye. But i will fall into the trap and give you some answers.
Yes, you can make something like Skyrim in BGE/UPBGE/RANGE … u just gonna have to scale everything down and cheat a bit …
Basically, your game will be 1 single scene that is limited to something like 100K vertex , 5 lamps max , some static objects, some dynamic objects and 10 characters max… all u have to do is to master the place and the moment all the entities are replaced the same frame
Being outdoors and entering a castle → black loading screen → interior of the castle
Your static mesh was a low poly valley with a nice fake mountain background, the lamp was the sun , the flying characters are birds ( yes you can put the mesh of a bird on the armature of an human and make a flying animation)
→ After the black screen, your static mesh is a big entrance of the castle, your lamp is now a big log fire and the characters have now the mesh of soldiers …
So basically , if you do it smart and creative , you can fake open world … just by using natural “gates” that will give illusion of a seamless transition.
Basically, your game will be 1 single scene that is limited to something like 100K vertex , 5 lamps max , some static objects, some dynamic objects and 10 characters max… all u have to do is to master the place and the moment all the entities are replaced the same frame
Those limits sound a bit too dramatic. Shouldn’t we expect to get performance comparable to what we see when modelling in Blender in Eevee “Render Preview” mode? I mean, 5 realtime lamps sounds more like a limit in Godot, not in Blender… I’m saying this because I started with Godot and when I imported my Blender scene with like 50 lights, a scene that was rendering flawlessly in Blender, Godot just couldn’t handle it without baking everything.
Don’t know for Godot, but yeah i saw some demos some time ago and the fps was pretty crap … maybe Godot is faster now …
Upbge EEVEE is not an option, too bad performance. RANGE is good in imo, i say 5 lamps provided that there’s 100K vertex (coz lamps work when theres’ vertex ) and many characters … it’s up to anyone to choose their favorite balance, but for me, it cannot go under 60 fps on a 10 years old computer . So yes, 5 lamps are enough if you re-use them all along the game (player trajectory)
You gonna want to bake some Scene AO map anyway … (like i did on the little video above) … Lamps in BGE don’t provide indirect lighting
Overall, from what I gather in recent threads, (UP)BGE has some issue with dynamic loading/unloading of assets into scenes? I’ve seen a claim recently even endObject is problematic. If that’s so, it seems definitely worth it to fork and customize in case game needs view-distance based asset management. Blender itself definitely can handle creating/loading/destroying any assets in the scene dynamically.
it’s not going to be obscenely massive, what i had in mind is like a dungeon area with loaded levels. a towns area, a court yard graveyard level. then a wooded area for exploration. i am thinking about breaking the area into manageable pieces if the game engine can’t handle it. I heard load script been through around so I may use that method to load levels if blender gets laggy
Now, I am not saying I am good on follow through on projects. I tend to be sporadic on my ventures. But I being wanting to test the boundaries of what I can do. It looks like i am doing everything myself but it may be not realistic to get a small team together.
What’s going on here? I don’t get it. Your posts feel like time travel 20 years ago. Are you being serious? What is this?
I don’t know how to use BGE or UPBGE at all, but I can sure do that in Python in regular Blender scene. What’s going on around? Where am I? What’s happening?
BGE uses the bge python library and not bpy. Also, to answer your concerns , a game has to run much faster than a 3d viewport whilst using 2d filters and Anti-aliasing . So yes, the game Scene has to far more lighter than a 3d scene of some Blender scene made for Image rendering.
5 Lamps with 2048x Shadows processing 100K vertex scene is still an achievement to compute that more than 60 times per second
UE5 is 120gb+ installed, takes 30+ minutes to compile shaders on first launch, and I haven’t seen a single game made with it that worked well on my gaming laptop (Lenovo Legion 5). Also, I’m personally not a big fan of photorealism and I’d rather have fun in Blender with ShaderToRGB node.
I am not really attacking your choice to use UPBGE. But we are talking about “huge open-world games”. And I think this is actually a very serious obstacle for choosing UPBGE - hugely superior options exist.
I think your personal laptop is not very relevant in the field to be honest.
Yes, and the discussion is mostly about performance in open world games. And in case of UE5 it’s terrible except the top 10% hardware available on market. I believe it might be easier and much cheaper to build open world game with simpler graphics in some of the lightweight engines (maybe even some of Blender based engines including UPBGE) that will perform better on wider range of hardware, than to build open world game with modern photorealistic graphics than will perform well even only on the top 10% of hardware in UE5. And it might even sell well, because gamers moved beyond the mindset of chasing the newest graphics a long time ago.
Well, it’s relatively new, so the games made in it are new. I don’t get it why you are so concerned about the hardware. What does it matter? People play games on new hardware. You mentioned Lenovo Legion 5 laptop, that’s i7-10750H and RTX 2060. That’s old hardware now in gaming context and it’s a laptop. Who makes games for old hardware?.. Of course new games will be for new hardware - that’s how it works. It has always been like this. What does it matter in game development context? If you are developing a serious game it takes time - a few years at least of course you want to work with top 10%the top hardware available on the market. It will get old by the time you finish. Is that now obvious?.. It should be. Am I wrong here?..
“Massive world RPG” is in the title. If that’s the context, that’s the situation. That’s why the question seemed misguided to me in the first place. Unrealistic for a beginner who might have a question like that. A way better approach would be to concentrate on the basics.
Game - an activity that one engages in for amusement or fun.
No “massive”, no “open world”, no “top hardware” no “tens of millions” in there. Looks like a more decent place to start. And in this context, by the way there is absolutely nothing wrong with UPBGE either!