How to import Antarctica into game?!

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#13

If it’s not possible I might end up just making specific Antarctic landmarks small enough that the server can handle and then connect them using multiple places.

@Tyler148 But the point is that it’s an accurate map of Antarctica not just a random snowy place.

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#14

This seems like the most reasonable approach.

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#15

Yes, of course. If there are too many tris in a mesh you could always divide the mesh into smaller parts.

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#16

That’s actually a good idea but it gives me a question. Why can’t they just download the whole mesh/small pieces and put them in manually?

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#17

You would procedurally generate your “accurate” terrain in a viewing distance around the player. So again, procedural generation. There is no possible way to store this in a performant way so you have to take a more elegant and dynamic approach to tackle something this huge.

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#18

wait you might be onto something.

I’m still not sure what you mean about procedural generation (maybe idk what that word means)

but what if I streamed on the server only areas of the map where players are. That way I don’t have to have the entire Antarctica loaded onto the server.

If any of this is possible I still have know idea how to go about it so that the terrain placement is accurate.

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#19

Here is a talk about Procedural Generation by a member of the community.

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#20

I would watch that video about Procedural Generation, but to answer your question:

I think that’s actually a good idea. You could store parts and their location in a datastore or something if you wanted to since data stores have no maximum size limit. However, they do have rate limits, so that could be a bottleneck. To get around that bottleneck, you would likely need to store an entire “zone” in a single data store entry and load all zones near the player.

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#22

Well I was planning on generating terrain using heightmaps not use Parts.

I still have no leads on how I could make a system for generating terrain in the right location.

This is my vague idea which I don’t know how to implement.

  • Split up Antarctica into “chunks”
  • The chunks need to be accurate and merge seamlessly when placed next to the chunk next to it
  • Load in X amount of chunks around each player in a StreamingEnabled fashion

I have no idea how I would get and position “chunks” from a source (some of the websites I linked)

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#23

You’re going to have to find some constant relationship between Roblox Stud/XYZ values and real-world latitude, longitude, and height to be able to make a coherent mapping of the real-world onto Roblox. What the numbers would look like and how you would mathematically approach this I don’t know, but fundamentally speaking this is probably how it would have to be done.

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#24

Search up “images in real life to mesh” on youtube. Might be your best bet.

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#25

import it to blender and then scale it down. that’s all i can think of.

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#26

Why can’t you just colour it in paint and then import it as a map.

How can this be so hard?

If you have a map the size of 16k then you probably should have StreamingEnabled. Just be careful of water. Water gets really laggy very quick when scaled up. Just be careful of that.

Here is the steps:

  • Get an accurate map of Antarctica must have well defined lines
  • Go to paint
  • Get color of ice and glacier and fill colour inside the Antarctic and fill colour for water outside.
  • Import colour data to Roblox.

For height data you can attempt to find some height data that matches your needs on the internet or just create some yourself.

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#27

Could you potentially use this? City Loader Plugin - Templates for Real Life Buildings/Cities in Studio

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#30

I hate to break this to you, but this just isn’t going to be happening. Antartica to scale is larger than the entire USA. You’re not going to be able to import an entire continent onto ROBLOX to scale.

Edit: To give you an idea of just how large this will be, Antartica to scale will be the size of over half a billion baseplates (assuming each baseplate is about 512 x 512 feet).

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#31

That’s why it might be helpful to fully read OP where they say they want to downscale it.

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#32

Even at the 1/1000th scale that’d be over half a million base plates so does 500,000+ baseplates side by side in one game sound realistic?

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#33

Maybe they can do 1/1000000 and scale the players down as well?

Edit: I just realized the player will be 0.000005 studs tall

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#34

get a map reference and model over that with blender or just studio

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#35

From my calculations it would have to be at least 1/10,000,000th but even then, it was like 57 base plates which I honestly don’t know how realistic that would even be. Any smaller and it would just be easier to take the terrain tools and scribble some ice in the shape of Antartica.

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