Do I create semi-large worlds one chunk at a time?

I want to create an area out of town say, 8 x 4 Km. Do I create it all at once, or build it in 1 x 1 Km chunks?

Edit: Not sure if it matters, but I plan on using Gaia

 

Totally depends on the project. For me (first-person open-world adventure game) I built a rough map first (which was subject to change), then started honing in on each area as it was needed for the quests/content. However before any of that I needed a proof of concept, or vertical slice, which was something like a tenth of a km. My entire map is 1km x 1km and that feels absolutely massive (though I worked hard to make it feel that way with site lines and relative scale). Skyrim is something like 5 x 3 km, substantially smaller than your 8 x 4 km. You're game might make use more land though, or maybe you move faster.

There are also a million and one ways to structure your data. You could generate a very big world from noise algorithms, but if your world is more hand-authored, it will likely take more memory and have to be divided into chunks that load asynchronously as you move around.

 

Research ways that this is already done in Unity. For example, read through the SECTR Stream and World Streamer documentation to get an idea of how they do it.

Get your tech in place before creating actual content. These are some common pieces that will kill a project if they're not solidly resolved very early in development:

• Streaming parts of the world in and out
• Saved games
• Multiplayer

 

Thank you I will read what you suggested, it seems like it should explain it. Appreciate the link.

 

Here are links:

• SECTR Stream
• World Streamer

 

Are you talking about how you organize and deploy the world, or your process of building out the content of the world?

Assuming the later, if you're building the entire world by hand, and try to build it all at once, you're going to need all of the assets for your world ready to go before even getting started. That's not really all that practical, in that you're going to want to test a lot of your game and a lot of your world assets before you would build out the entire world. So I'd build it out in pieces, and you'll end up revisiting the earlier parts again later as you find better ways of polishing things.