I am looking to recreate òne real-world geographic region (say egypt or greece) and I need to create a region-map of sorts. I need to place down terrain features like rivers, woods, mountains, sea etc and other metadata (climate, temperature and so on) and export it to some resource format that I can read in the engine. Important to note I am not looking for any randomized world gen tools since I already know how the end result should look like.

I have two ideas in mind;

1. Roll my own world editor to do all this - I have a feeling it would be alot of work

2. Use some existing tool for this. It might save some time.

Has anyone any experience with making your own editor like this? What about some practical issues like how coupled should the editor be with the engine? should the editor use the engine for rendering?

Have you looked at the UE4 terrain editing facilities and World editing tools plus level and asset streaming?

It seems it's all written already for you there and will save you a ton of work...

Look on YouTube for the UE4 kite demo. This was all hand rolled terrain and lots of AAA assets and is created with only the built in tools.

Hope this is helpful :)

Is this for use only in UE4? Can you export it and use it in your own engine?

For tilemaps you could try http://www.mapeditor.org/. For more free maps you could use an image editor to define various map layers, that is what games like Europa Universalis use.

For more free maps you could use an image editor to define various map layers, that is what games like Europa Universalis use.

I suppose that could be an option. Using Adobe photoshop to generate map layers and then use that to render terrain in the engine?

KaiserJohan, on 30 Dec 2016 - 4:44 PM, said: Brain, on 30 Dec 2016 - 4:35 PM, said: Have you looked at the UE4 terrain editing facilities and World editing tools plus level and asset streaming? It seems it's all written already for you there and will save you a ton of work... Look on YouTube for the UE4 kite demo. This was all hand rolled terrain and lots of AAA assets and is created with only the built in tools. Hope this is helpful :) Is this for use only in UE4? Can you export it and use it in your own engine? Well there is source for the entire engine, so you could read the source and see how it's stored. It will probably be a lot of work though...

Wouldn't that be illegal?

Most engines do not allow taking their tools to create assets for your own engine. They would not see a cent for their work.

Is there any reason you're using a home made engine btw?

I'm doing research on unsolved problems, no actual game. A large engine would make this just harder. Maybe i'll create a plugin for those if i'm successful.

But even if it would be different, i think it's very good lots of AAA studios and indies still develop their own engines.