Fellow blenderers, I have been wanting for a long time and with no success, to make an open world game based on my hometown. I understand it is nearly impossible to add every street and model each individual house. That is not hard to see. but if i could make a game with cities like GTA: San Andreas, that would fill my hunger for a true game. I had planned on doing this by myself for personal reasons, but wondered. what in your opinion is the best engine for an open world 3rd person type game? I mean no offense to the blender engine by any means. I have been a loyal Blenderer for quite a few years, we all know that the BGE isnt the best option. Sounds, textures and other small things are not a problem just need an engine that can handle a huge world and has features already embedded within the engine (dynamic loading, shaders, lighting, etc). I can create my own models and such so not a problem.
Maybe Unity? It has mecanim for animating your character and it can handle quite a large world. And if you download the Sample Assets pack, it has a mouse orbit script that works like San Andreas’ one does. Up to you!
Its all about proper LODs, streaming, visual trickery and occlusion culling to make a game like gta.
The environment for example, there is a single plane with ‘satellite view map’ texture on it.
Then there is a single very low poly base mesh for the whole terrain + buildings.
Over that you have several individual LODs for buildings and streets.
Animation for characters not in view are not played, continued when looking back at them.
Far away characters use the same low poly mesh (~24 verts) that closely resemble a human.
Physics doesn’t use ‘mesh type’, instead a ‘set of boxes and spheres’ to mimic the actual physics shape.
Uses different textures and different meshes in combination to generate different pedestrian characters.
Same texture is used multiple times in combination with others to give different results.
“Just Cause 2” from Square Enix is a great example of such techniques.
You’ll need good programming skills to achieve this no matter what engine.
So you’re thinking about your dream game, it’s a typical start to game development.
But you can’t start out with such a big project, you’ll get nowhere with it. You need to make simple games first and learn the basics. Eventually you’ll learn to see that making your own GTA is impossible as well as pointless.
You can always go mod the GTA games which is both feasible and purposeful.
While I appreciate the comment, that actually is a bit insulting. I have been a part of the Blender community since 2.48 and have experimented and tested the bge’s capabilities. I know my limits on making a game and this wouldnt be all too difficult. the hardest part of this project other than modeling and scripting the game out would be to make it run smooth. Which is why I asked about other game engines that have more potential.
I have my starting base for making the game…its my hometown. I dont have to think of a game from scratch, no concept artwork is needed… all i need to do is use google earth to its fullest. and if i needed too, i could drive just about anywhere and see things for myself. The game would be small but emulating a large scale game. If you look at gta games, they actually dont have very many streets.
I didn’t mean to offend, your text just reads like you don’t know game development very well or haven’t actually made many games.
There is no game engine that renders an entire city in real time, some games are just built to seem that way. All the tricks you’d need to use on BGE you will have to use on Unity / UDK as well and not all of them are any more readily set up for you over there.
A town is not a game and an open world game is not a game idea. All you have is a setting with no laid out idea of how you’re going to actually use it. You still need to design levels and content. Simply having a frame of reference doesn’t enable you to model vertex topology or unwrap UV’s any faster, the modeling workload is still mostly the same as working with imagination.
The first rule about optimization is don’t optimize until you need to. Whenever I see GTA pop up in these posts I can’t but tell the other guy to hold his horses as most of these people have never created enough content in total to slow the game down (without resorting into horribad modeling or programming).
