World size, and foliage handling

[arieas]

I've been wondering how big can a world potentially be? Is there a hard coded limit to the engine, or maybe technical limitation.

 

And also how does the engine handle foliage?

Say if I were to make a jungle (not quite on crysis detail) across a wide area, does the engine handle a sort of tree/plant system that can enable vast amounts of trees, (like speedtree)

 

 

I'm not actually intending to develop anything at present, just prospecting. :smile:

[TheMagician]

I've been wondering how big can a world potentially be? Is there a hard coded limit to the engine, or maybe technical limitation.

 

And also how does the engine handle foliage?

Say if I were to make a jungle (not quite on crysis detail) across a wide area, does the engine handle a sort of tree/plant system that can enable vast amounts of trees, (like speedtree)

 

 

I'm not actually intending to develop anything at present, just prospecting. :smile:

 

I'm not sure what the real limit is, but worldspaces theoretically can be quite large. The Mesogea mod for Oblivion uses almost 16x16 quads (a quad is approximately a mile across) and FO3 uses essentially the same engine. Above a certain number of quads the GECK tends to choke owing to memory constraints, however, so you have to create mods of this size in stages and it can get quite complicated.

 

As far as foliage goes, the FO3 engine does use some speedtree assets (retextured plants from Oblivion) but it isn't possible to create new ones unless you happen to own a compatible copy of speedtree. Wasteland plants are typically static meshes which can be constructed in any modeling application, but they won't react to wind/weather. In other words, you can create the foliage, but it won't have the same quality as native foliage. Foliage can be automatically generated via region generation but it takes some time to get the hang of it. Also, the engine essentially treats foliage as any other static, so large numbers of trees are going to kill your framerate.

 

One other issue you should be aware of before embarking on any large-scale landscaping project is that FO3 has a seriously unoptimized LOD (distant landscape meshes) generation algorithm. Creating any worldspace larger than a few cells across (which are 1/16th of a quad) is going to cost you processor time: a worldspace the size of the Wasteland is going to take you a couple of weeks of non-stop generation to complete (better hope you get everything just the way you like it the first time); I'm guessing that one the size of the Mesogea worldspace would take a couple of months. (That's just the GECK generating the files without any input from you.) If you are planning anything with majestic vistas, I'd recommend sticking with the Crysis engine.

 

hth