Open world illusion tips?

Hey guys, so over the last several weeks I have been doing mountains of research, downloading similar games to what I feel would be close to mine and putting all my ideas on paper. One issue I am having is finding the balance between vastness and detail. My game is going to start on the Android platform and hopefully IOS if I get enough support. This is going to significantly lower what amount of detail I can include in my game.

To be straight forward, this will sound very cliche and maybe laughable. Ive liked post apocalyptic scenery before it was popular with games this being said Ive always wanted to be a part of that community. I started with the first two Fallouts and a few others. My goal is to make a small open world game, but the issue as said above is about a balance. I know there are a lot of things limiting us to doing what we see in our imagination, so my question is this; What methods are there to creating an illusion of vastness? This way I can keep the game with a fair amount of detail not just graphics but objects and small things that you DO notice when playing a game.

Im going to try keeping poly count down using textures for detail but even then I can only add so much. I do plan to have a few vehicles later on if i can afford to hire someone to help with it. This game will be pretty simple, defend your settlement, loot buildings, evade enemies etc. Its not going to be overly detailed since its for the phone.

 

Somewhere, there is a video of the making of Fire Watch. They did a great job of giving the illusion of a larger world. Very impressive. Try searching on YouTube.

 

There is a great Unity talk on VR that does a great bit on how to render skyboxes so that you don't need to do a render pass for the entire map every frame.

It starts at 17:40.

He talks about doing this for outdoor scenes, but you could easily update it it at key points so that the player doesn't notice it.

Like for example, it will do it every time (Distance from last mark) x (Time from last mark) >= (variable derived from the FPS) AND it will do it every time the player opens the menu.

So when the game is has a low performance section it will update more often, and when the player opens their menu.

 

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023191/Making-the-World-of

 

Thanks for input! It's pretty much impossible to make a legit full scale open world like skyrim or GTA....Or fallout but illusion of vastness should help a lot

 

If you're talking isometric, then you really only have map size to create the feeling of "vastness"... Skyboxes and similar considerations are more about FPS-style interaction (though I suppose you could also try for that feel with parallax layering in a side scroller or platformer). Those all come down to "stuff beyond the horizon".

I just finished Wasteland 2 (yeah, late to the party, I know) and many of those maps felt very large. Now I'm playing the new Torment from the same team and those maps feel downright tiny, so even a game with no horizon in view can give that impression. Of course, in that case there is no "trick" to it -- the map *is* the game in many ways, so I guess the "feeling of vastness" has to actually be vastness, in a certain sense.

 

No, it's completely possible.

How do you think they do it?

They don't have the entire world loaded up at all times. They stream in chunks of the map and then have another camera render a model of the background. In Skyrim they even use that model as the map.

Unity is perfectly capable of doing anything that Unreal, Cry, or Gambryo based engines (Skyrim and GTA) can do. The only difference is that Unity aims to be simpler to develop for and is more inclusive of platforms, rather than have a bunch of out of the box tools.

If you want you could try using Crytek or Lumberyard which are tailored to making open world games. But they require you to work in C++ (which is a lower language than C# and harder to learn) and you would need to compile the game every time you want to test it. Also they both have much weaker communities, less documentation, and less 3rd party support.

To use either engine effectively, you'll REALLY need to know what you're doing.

Otherwise, Unity is MUCH better for learning.

 

There are some new assets in development that will help you get better fps on your terrains and optimize vegetation as well as terrain LOD. Also, World Streamer and Sectre both allow you to stream in chunks. It is not impossible, just challenging. But you can do it.

 

There's a great analysis of GTA V's graphics pipeline here where you might pick up a few tips, though I'm not sure how many would apply to mobile

The level design can help make a world seem bigger than it is.

 

I like to use 2 games that came out around the same time to describe the trade-off you're talking about.

Shenmue vs Grand Theft Auto 3

Shenmue has a detailed, beautiful and interactive world. But it's shown in a segmented way (neighborhoods) which allows great amounts of detail to be loaded.

GTA 3 on the other hand has a huge world (in comparison) but is way less detailed and personal.

I'd say study both of those games to see how the developers leveraged similarly powered hardware for open world game designs in such different ways.

 

Also, remember a world can be made to feel bigger or smaller by changing how your character moves about in it. A big world on foot is a small world in a car.

 

Last thing is contrast, valley and mountain linked by narrow corridor, staggered composition that create layer of horizontal line, with massive landmark (like a volcano) always visible at any point without a cover, lots of "events" (smaller poi, the human memory works with events, the more event the longer time seems to be) happening along key path do help a lot.

Never have a straight line to a POI, alternate visibility along critical path (like going "indoor", passing between visual blocker etc ...) have many other stop before that point. Chance is that by being distracted by careful placement of POI (using 3 tier hierarchy of how far they are seen, important or visually potent) it makes the path seems longer than it is.

I'm playing BOTW and everyone is telling how big the game is, personally I find it quite small because I too analytics to get the tricks fool me, but they are masterfully using all these tricks (and so is skyrim that is 10 time smaller than this game).