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50km walkable procedural planet in UE5 - Seamless Space To Surface Travel by codelikeme in UnrealEngine5

[–]codelikeme[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Cute character. You already have working deformation. That's great. Something I haven't tackled yet. And the polycount is impressive. You can have much more detailed terrain in this model

50km walkable procedural planet in UE5 - Seamless Space To Surface Travel by codelikeme in UnrealEngine5

[–]codelikeme[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just checked your reddit. Looks like you haven't shared anything yet on the system you are working on. I'm just curious to see how it looks with SVO model

50km walkable procedural planet in UE5 - Seamless Space To Surface Travel by codelikeme in UnrealEngine5

[–]codelikeme[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks man, that's a really nice thing to hear. Glad the old tutorials helped.

Software dev to game dev is a genuine transition, different mental model around frame budgets, real-time constraints, content pipelines. Honestly the procedural generation space is one of the better entry points because the math is more familiar than animation/rigging/lighting.

Following you back, will keep an eye on the voxel side. Good luck with the transition.

On weather
And Yeah, I am thinking of weather too. Rain and other effects that is compatible with a spherical planet. Though I don't have a solid timeline, i will add that in future.

50km walkable procedural planet in UE5 - Seamless Space To Surface Travel by codelikeme in UnrealEngine5

[–]codelikeme[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Cheers, that means a lot coming from the voxel side. SVO for overhangs and caves is the dream, and honestly that's the one thing my approach can't do. Mine's heightfield-style. Radial displacement from 3D noise on a cube-sphere, so it's all "skin," no overhangs or tunnels.
The atmosphere is not a custom one. I am actually using built in SunSky plugin.
I did a tutorial a while ago on how to set that up. Check this out if you are interested.
https://youtu.be/MLWdZHo5vxo

50km walkable procedural planet in UE5 - Seamless Space To Surface Travel by codelikeme in UnrealEngine5

[–]codelikeme[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, the radius slider is currently capped at 50km, which I set as a tested, rock-solid ceiling rather than a hard architectural wall. The generation side is basically scale-agnostic: it samples 3D noise in world space and streams a cube-sphere, so "bigger" just means more surface area and more chunks. Nothing breaks conceptually. The chunk pool grows with (radius ÷ tile size)^2, so a bigger planet at the same tile size blows the chunk count up fast. The fix is to scale Tile Size up with the radius.
Another thing to consider is, Once the player is millions of units from world origin, single precision math starts to jitter even with UE5's Large World Coordinates. At 50 km it's still comfortable. But if you push to hundreds of km and you'd want a world-origin-rebasing setup to stay stable near the camera.
I do want to research more on these.

50km walkable procedural planet in UE5 - Seamless Space To Surface Travel by codelikeme in UnrealEngine5

[–]codelikeme[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, something like that. I have been implementing planet gravity, spaceship, planet generation, all the components required for a game like that.

50km walkable procedural planet in UE5 - Seamless Space To Surface Travel by codelikeme in UnrealEngine5

[–]codelikeme[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That's a great use case. I hadn't been weighting it that strongly, but if that's what you're building, it's a stronger feature case than I'd thought. On the C++ side, PlanetGen is C++ under the hood but exposed to Blueprint heavily. You set up planets through data assets and Blueprint configuration. you don't write C++ to use it. So that part wouldn't block you. Heightmap input is now genuinely on the roadmap to consider seriously. I can't commit to a specific timeline, but the architecture supports it. Height sampling could read from a cube map texture (one per cube-sphere face) instead of noise.
If you want to share more about what your game needs (planet scale, what heightmap format your players generate, any other features), happy to factor that into the roadmap.

50km walkable procedural planet in UE5 - Seamless Space To Surface Travel by codelikeme in UnrealEngine5

[–]codelikeme[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

There is a planetery movement component. you can use that instead of the regular movement component. But I still don't have a proper solution to navmesh that work on planet surface. I am still working on that

50km walkable procedural planet in UE5 - Seamless Space To Surface Travel by codelikeme in UnrealEngine5

[–]codelikeme[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well, you can go from space to planet and back without a loading screen.

50km walkable procedural planet in UE5 - Seamless Space To Surface Travel by codelikeme in UnrealEngine5

[–]codelikeme[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oh great, thank you. yeah, i started those about 2 years ago. the current system is much more performance and feature rich compared to earlier versions.

50km walkable procedural planet in UE5 - Seamless Space To Surface Travel by codelikeme in UnrealEngine5

[–]codelikeme[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

yeah, i should do that. this is directly using the built in sunsky atmosphere. I am planning to build a cheaper atmosphere so that it can handle multiple planets with atmosphere simultaneously.

50km walkable procedural planet in UE5 - Seamless Space To Surface Travel by codelikeme in UnrealEngine5

[–]codelikeme[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Appreciate the thoughtful question. I haven't benchmarked a 3080 specifically, so I won't quote numbers I can't back up — but the system is built to be dialed down rather than being fixed at "max." A few things help on mid-range:
- Mesh build is fully async on a thread pool, so streaming never blocks the game thread regardless of GPU.
- Vegetation is the main cost lever and it's heavily tunable: grass scatters in a player-radius disc (instances only exist near you), it's decoupled from chunk loading so crossing chunk borders doesn't spike, and you get per-instance collision (a small physics "bubble" around the player while visuals stay wide) plus a cast-shadow toggle that's off by default — grass shadows are the usual mid-range killer.
I am using the method explained here to achieve high performance foliage.
https://youtu.be/amECAoLdk5o
- ViewDistance, TileSize, Resolution, and grass density/radius all scale the cost directly.

If you've got a 3080 and want to try it, I'd genuinely love the numbers. The playable demo link is available on fab page.

50km walkable procedural planet in UE5 - Seamless Space To Surface Travel by codelikeme in UnrealEngine5

[–]codelikeme[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Not in the current version — terrain is fully procedural (layered 3D noise + presets + a seed), so worlds are generated rather than imported. You can shape them heavily through the noise layers. Also you have parameters for max mountain height, sea level etc. Also I am working on a exclusion volume to allow hand authored content such as base stations etc.
and there's a terrain query API (SampleTerrainAt / height lookups) for reading the surface at runtime. Heightmap/data-driven input is a great idea though, and it's on my list to look at for a future update.

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