Building the map using terrain editor or parts?

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#1

I am currently working on an RPG game and am having a hard time choosing between how I should build the map. What would the benefits be if I were to use one over the other?

My goal is to make a map that feels similar to Elden Ring or the Witcher series and I am planning to include horses and wall climbing to the game. I can’t decide on whether building the map using parts or terrain editor would be better. Pls Help :frowning:

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#2

Since you want an expansive RPG with wall climbing and horse mechanics, a hybrid approach might work best:

  • Terrain Editor for natural landscapes (mountains, forests, rivers, etc.)—this gives you the open-world feel similar to Elden Ring and The Witcher.
  • Parts for detailed architecture and specific climbable surfaces (castles, ruins, cliffs)—this allows precision for mechanics like wall climbing and controlled paths for horse travel.

You can combine the two to create a seamless and immersive world with high performance and rich detail.

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#3

Yea use Parts for some stuff, but for the main map use Terrain. Or, your game would lag a lot
Just imagine the part count.

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#4

I have tried to do my map for old game too. Had same choice. That’s what I have came up to:

Parts:

+ Much faster to work with, even if you are making small details.
+ You can place waht and how you want.
+ Wide range of materials, colors and textures.
- Building with parts results in thousands of instances.
+ Parts can be really big to cover one part of map, and they will be much more performant than 100000 voxels of terrain in such case.
+ Map changes can be easilly scripted.

Terrain:

± Much faster to build simple, flat terrain, but really fast becomes pain if you need to do mountain or build smth precizely (read 4th point to see reason to that).
- Limited to 4 grid
- Limited material choice and material color lock.
- You need to keep it thin to save memory, or otherwise all “underground” voxels will be real memory leak and cause of replication lag (when player loads it).
+ Grass has cool grass blades.
- Hard to script.
- Navigational mesh likes to break with terrain.
+ Swimmable water.

Overall, I have came to a conclusion that I’ll use parts and meshes. Grass blades can be scripted by myself, it’s not that hard, and that’s the only benefit of terrain.
Water is only thing that may be used, but again - it will be much better to have parted water, but it requires scripting again.

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