Level Designer Handcrafted/Mixed Procedural musings of floating islands

...having a mix of handcrafted "Authored" professional maps ("islands"). If they are floating in the sky, we simply cover the bottoms of the missing terrain with static meshes. This is the easiest solution, with the potential for artificial semi-destruction if needed (debris and particles chip off, and some minor pieces could fracture away, but overall, the island can't be destroyed). This is a solid first step before considering full destruction.

An alternative solution would require code support to allow the designer to sculpt the terrain using the various methods/tools and plugins listed below.

• World Machine: Better for massive-scale floating islands.

• LandMass: Good for modifying terrain; a way to make better UX design and allow players to have similar abilities.

Once the terrain is sculpted to a good shape for the upper half of the island, save the terrain and make a mirror copy inverting it so the top matches the bottom. Then the designer could separately and independently edit the bottom terrain. Once satisfied with the bottom portion of the island, a stitching function would need to be called to attach the two terrains at the seams so there are no holes. Any anomalies in the terrain with holes could be patched up with static meshes—this isn't the final solution, but perhaps the best for an Alpha prototype. Planet-sized terrain can also be generated with geospheres made of quads, with procedurally generated tilesets.

User-Generated Content: Creating and building experiences can be like a game. To maximize accessibility and allow players to intuitively create and play, serious thought and design need to go into the type of terrain, if it is a floating island which can be a bit trickier but very plausible. Whether it is fully destructible or not, having a special type of player tool like in Astroneer, allowing the player to mine, sculpt, and add terrain, will provide a lot of creative freedom.

Biomes and Tilesets:

• Biomes are "dressings" applied over a tileset.

• Levels consist of multiple square terrain tiles (chunks) assembled based on matching edge profiles and metadata as determined by the mission director.

• Terrain Chunk Size: The terrain chunk size is 757.5M square, chosen based on Unreal’s terrain resolution. The chunk size can be tuned as needed.

• Tileset: A set of 750x750 heightmaps generated from World Machine, each with specific topologies (e.g., Mountains vs. Dunes). Tiles fit together using terrain generation rules.

Terrain Techniques:

• Unreal Voxel Plugin: Useful for combining fluid simulation with destructible environments in Unreal Engine.

• Voxel Farm: A versatile tool for voxel-based terrain.

• LandMass Plugin: High-fidelity terrains that can be fine-tuned.

• MegaScans: Adding foliage, rocks, and static meshes.

• Houdini: Powerful but complex; potentially useful for creating user-friendly player tools.