March 24th, 2023 Video

Map Tiles vs. World Partition System

https://youtube.com/embed/dY__x2dq7Sk?autoplay=1&start=527&end=824

Topics

• Satisfactory Updates > Released > Satisfactory Update 8
• Technology > Unreal Engine > Unreal Engine 5
• Environment > World Map

Transcript

using it so currently in the the version of satisfactory that you all are playing right now, in Unreal Engine 4. the map has been split up in a seven by six grid I believe of tiles right and the map is really big and so a 7x6 grid of tiles means those tiles are massive they're absolutely massive and you all know as as players of the game that when you approach, the bounds of a tile there's a small hitch and we have to load in the entire next tile, so that yeah so that you can move through that tile right now this is really inefficient because if you think about it we're actually loading in a whole bunch of assets that aren't actually relevant to you right so when you walk up to a tile and you're at the front of a tile we're loading literally everything including the stuff at the far side of the tile that you can't even see or interact with like that's irrelevant to you right so this is fair really inefficient we're loading so many assets that don't matter to you at that point we're doing it all in one go and so there's a hitch and this also means that without our workflow the way that that worked before was that all of those assets that we put down the the actors right that we put down in the world on those tiles they were tied to the tile right so if the tire if we ever wanted to render those things trigger them anything we had to load the entire tile and there was no way to work with those actors independent of the tile however now with the world petition system in under Legend 5 we've moved away from the actors on the tiles being tied to the tile to becoming just like a a file per actor thing so the actors are actually independent of tiles and they're actually if anything they're just tied to like the location in the world that they are and so like when we're developing the game every actor on the map has a file in the file system and and and and so we can sort of this gives us more sort of flexibility in how we we work and do things however that won't be the case for you guys when the game gets cooked and built, everything will will be cook down to what it needs to be right now what this means is if those actors aren't tied to the tile anymore and that instead they're tied to a location it means that we have a much more flexible system now to actually break up the map into smaller tiles, chunks and we can experiment with those tile chunks and we can quickly and easily decide well what what tile size and and tile chunks you know setup is most efficient for satisfactory, before this was virtually impossible because to change a tile size we have to rework a whole bunch of stuff and move assets on all this we have to manually do that and then test whether or not it works or not and then if it doesn't we would have to like do all of it again and then test if it works now we can just very quickly by changing some parameters affect how big the tile size is it doesn't affect the actors that are out on the map and we can just more quickly tune our tiling system and World streaming system to be what's most effective for status Factory another thing that helps us with is previously whenever we wanted to make any changes to any part of the world we would have to check out an entire tile change those actors and then submit those tiles which meant large chunks of the map couldn't be worked on simultaneously and they run into issues there was like a lot of like we need to like roll back fixes or merge things there's people on different branches it was it was a complete Nightmare and this gets rid of all of that for us so this helps us so much in development and the result will be a much smoother, experience for you guys we believe and so how do these tweaks kind of work and how would this Tech sort of work so like if we if we can find a sweet spot when it comes to tile size it means that we can find a way to stream in only the stuff that's relevant to you, wherever you are on the map which means we will stream in parts of the map more often but it'll be less data so the expectation or the intention is that there will be no hitches or smaller hitches hopefully no hitches, since less data needs to be loaded in if we finally tune what loads in and when and if we're really careful with the way we do our loading our level of details with models and things like that our our goal that we're striving for is potentially to have the whole world landscape visible if you're like really high up and looking down as opposed to just these big tiles that are missing if you get rid of the fog and it means we can maybe even lighting the fog so that you can allow you to see further and things like that so so this feature is huge and will make a huge impact on the player experience it'll help us a bunch with development, oh and it might even it might even fix, there was like a performance issue that some people had where if they happen to build their Factories near the edges of tiles this would just create certain situations where, basically things would would hitch and stutter more often and would be very sort of inefficient and this sort of does away with that issue as well so and there was no way for people to know if they were nearer edge of a tile or not so this feature is honestly, quite a godsend for us and for satisfactory and I think I think everyone is going to benefit so much from it that's this is the thing that I'm most excited about personally the next major feature that's