"Large Scale" terrain - best practices?

Hello - I was wondering how to properly scale terrain for a "world map" sized landscapes.

I'd like scale it in world units (ie, 1 = 1m), so I can do in-game things on it without having to convert units all the time. What's the best way to do this without sacrificing performance? Are there ways to "downrez" the terrain so it's the amount of triangles and nodes?

Thanks!

 

Quadtrees are well suited for handling the level of detail.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadtree

 

Sorry - I meant, what is the technical practice?

If I want to scale my terrain to the size of britain (600,000 world units), how do I keep the resolution of the terrain low enough to actually be rendered? I'm talking terrain settings in the editor, rather than a data construct.

Or am I better off using a different spatial reference (ie, treat 1 world unit as 1,000 world units, etc)

 

Typically for a large game like Skyrim, the big game world would be divided into lots of smaller terrains and you would load them and remove them as needed so that only the immediate area around the player exists at any one time. Skyrim, I believe, actually uses different terrains at different-levels-of-detail depending on how close or far you are.

That works too. How detailed does the terrain need to be? Are you walking around, or in a jet?

 

There's a good tutorial series on procedural terrain generation from Sebastian Lague.
This part here deals with switching resolutions for different levels of detail

 

My apologies for being unclear:

I want a 3d map of a continent that you might see in a game like Civilization or Total War - I don't mean large in traversable space, I mean large in game units (as long as we're using the same scale). If my map needs to be 600000 game units tall (with a camera suitably far away), what is the best practice for creating that terrain while keeping performance in mind?

 

Sure, but how would that be any different than mbaske and I already went over?

 

I'm not trying to implement an open world, so I don't need varying levels of detail at different scales. Literally I just want to scale up a regular terrain object to continental scale for use as a "world map" in a way that's not hell on performance.

 

Ah, I see what you mean, but I don't think there are any rules of thumb for this. you'd probably still want to use terrain tiles- but as for how big they are, and the polygon density- that's going to depend on a lot of things, like how far you can pull the camera back, and how fast you can travel over the map. Might require some trial and error.

My strategy to handle this, so far, has been to divide the map into logical "locations" but my game is an adventure game, rather than a strategy game, so that sort of strategy may not work in your case.

 

Use a mesh. Unity's terrain system has a high impact on performance but a normal mesh won't.

 

Hi!

I was wondering if you have been able to solve this issue? I am having the same question, any tips?

Thank you!