Tips and tricks on developing an open world game with Unreal Engine 4

What the talk is about

Costantin Yakushenko describes how a studio with ten years of his own experience, which previously built games on an in-house engine, made its first open-world game on Unreal Engine 4, Sinking City. He shows the tools: a building editor made of modular kits, a dialogue system, statistics collection and test bots. The city was split into districts and then grid cells for streaming, while nightly automated processes produced simplified LOD versions. He also covers the console memory struggle: tests that remove parts of the content, memory and FPS maps, and tracking of light sources. His advice: read the documentation, ask questions on the forums, restrict access to content, and be careful about depending on third-party plugins. Useful for technical artists and programmers building an open world in UE4.