I have a game that has been in the works for some time now and I am looking for a suitable engine. One of my requirements is having a rather large world map and I am curious as to whether or not Esenthel can achieve this. I noticed that 128 by 128 seems to be the limit for a World element. Can I tile World elements within an Environment element?

Thanks so much,
Max

it is the limitation a single Area in a World, and yes you can have many tiles, there is however nothing stopping you from making your own world system, and depending on a game there is no world container in any engine that I know of that is perfect for any specific type of game. it all depends on how plan your data and systems around them.
and asking for a large world without specifying what large is, makes it impossible to actually say if the built in world structure is suitable.

same rules I apply to when engines says supports large worlds or endless world or similar. if someone says endless I reason it to mean under some sort of tested case they have tried which might not mean it would suit my case of endless world.

An example would be creating a to-scale game world for all of Iceland. When playing it is not necessary to render the entire map at any given time, but moving across the land in any direction must be possible. Are you suggesting that the Esenthel engine could achieve this with the built in World and Environment elements or are you suggesting that most game engines have one way to create a world but that creating my own would be better? One way or another I will be generating tiled heightmaps that can be loaded in blocks to achieve level of detail.

EE world editor has a Stream mode, so you can load and unload depending of the location, but i am not sure if the world editor could take such a map.

best thing i would advice you is :
- download the engine.
- set up a map the size you need in the editor.
- run a tutorial with your map.
If it works, then the engine is good for you. else you might need to create a world manager or even more.

with the engine world manager i have been able to run map 100x100. 64 area size and 128 heightmap resolution just to give you an idea. but havent pushed more than this

considering a to-scale world at the size of iceland, you would need to do some tricks to offset the world to prevent precision issues, you would need to offset the world whenever you comes close to a floating point precision to prevent major issues, this is true regarding any engine I know of and you would essentially have to manage this in one of many ways different developers has done it in the past.

just wanted to add: since last few releases there's native support for drawing meshes with 64-bit (double precision) for matrix positions, however not yet available for animated characters (only non-animated meshes)

(10-31-2017 02:52 AM)Esenthel Wrote:  just wanted to add: since last few releases there's native support for drawing meshes with 64-bit (double precision) for matrix positions, however not yet available for animated characters (only non-animated meshes)

true, but in this case a to-scale world would mean 103,000km2 of logical traversable landmass so he would need to offset his world to handle logic in those areas. as rendering in these cases would be translated to local space relative to camera, atleast as far as I know of in these cases.

this way you do not sacrifice rendering performance due to GPUs being optimized for single precision and not mudering bandwidth to the GPU due to data transfers.

rendering with double is very nice for insanely precise drawing on the GPU though.

My double-precision implementation does not sacrifice GPU performance, it's just as fast as single precision.

(10-31-2017 08:55 AM)Esenthel Wrote:  My double-precision implementation does not sacrifice GPU performance, it's just as fast as single precision.

good to and glad to know.
but I do not think it would fix the problem of doing logical operations at those positions. afterall physics,game logic etc needs precision to work properly and doing good placement of objects/that can be used in physics simulation and/or game logic at those positions etc would still require world offsetting, unless you only wanted to do rendering at those distances.