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Question by TehNinjor · Apr 16, 2015 at 12:48 PM · designworld

Methods of designing a large open world (town/city)

Hey guys, Im working on a driving game, of which in the future I plan to have a rather sizable open map to drive around in (maybe a town, village and plenty of back roads/fields). Buildings would be med/low poly as you would never get too close to them.

For once in my life google hasn't turned up what I want/need to know. Whats the best method of designing/arranging a large world in unity? I have thought of a few ways I could do it:

  • Sculpt terrain in unity, use road tools to place roads, then place buildings from an asset pack that I will either buy or model myself, to build the world up etc.

  • Model/sculpt terrain, model the roads onto said terrain then texture both within blender. Then import into unity, but place assets as before, arrange them in unity.

  • Model terrain/roads/scenery/assets, texture everything with texture atlas', then import into unity as one complete "world" package, of which you could drop a Character in and walk around straight away.

Forgive me if Im wrong but I swear I read arranging assets separately in unity can lead to high draw calls and thus low performance? Thats whats swaying me to do the design in blender and import it as one model into unity.

Im pretty savvy with both blender and unity (nothing a google search cant fix anyway), so please leave technical ability aside. Most questions Ive read on this topic sort of get dismissed with a "try something less ambitious" but Id be pretty much sorted once Ive got a solid method.

So which idea is better (if not a matter of preference)? How do you guys arrange large worlds?

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avatar image KdRWaylander · Apr 16, 2015 at 01:12 PM 0
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Hi,

From my experience of level design in different games (even if i never was that good), i realize it's very difficult to be creative and make something nice on a very large map straight ahead. I always work by smaller tiles and then add them up to obtain the full map. You may want to have a general idea of the big lines of your map before of course. That's not a pro tip, it's just my little experience tip ^^

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