Hello there!
(...General Kenobi!)
It's Makrangoncias again. Today’s post is about Chapter 4. Working Title: “Surface”
Chapter 4 is coming in a few weeks and it's kind of a big deal for us. It’s the first level designed from scratch since the original 3, and boy can you feel the difference! The explorable area is roughly the same as chapter 1-2 COMBINED (maybe even bigger), the scales are off the chart, and everything is just huge.
Yep, that's a full-scale dump truck.
What made this easier to achieve is that this is a completely outdoor level, so we could utilize the “landscape” tool of Unreal, basically sculpting out the layout of the level instead of placing a ton of cubes.
Our next IP: Clay-Tech Cybernetic
What we were worried about though is that the size and outdoor nature of the level might affect performance. About performance: Vr-ready machines are basically the strongest PC-s commercially available on this planet, yet we still have to optimize the game as strictly as we would for a 5-8 year old hardware. Why? Because in VR games instead of just one, you have a total of 3 displays (2 for your eyes, and 1 for your desktop monitor). Each of them running around Full HD resolution (higher for the Vive Pro) and the two in your headset require at least 90fps. So it’s actually worse than rendering the game for three standard monitors, and that consumes a hell lot of hardware capacity.
Even a Titan starts to sweat under VR
But enough of the technicalities. The reason why most VR games play in very confined or at least well-separated areas is that these require much less resources to optimize. Nevertheless, we’ve tried implementing a truly massive, continuous map layout.
That circled area is the same size as the area of the hangar fight.
To our huge but pleasant suprise, the performance seems to be stable. What’s more it’s even more stable than on the usual indoor levels, so much so that we even managed to add some fancy new effects! Last but not least, the great render distance made is possible to utilize the new Sniper Rifle, and using it is a ton of fun.
A true beast for a wild map
From a design and gameplay perspective, Chapter 4 is a huge leap forward, but like everything else, it also comes with a price. We had to save time by avoiding events that require custom behavior, but I think the new environment, the sniper rifle and all the fresh gameplay that they bring will be more than enough to keep you entertained! We're crazy anxious about your feedback, you can expect Ch4 in the next few weeks!
Norbert (Makrangoncias)
Game and Level designer