3D Pokemon Game: Kanto

The Kanto map is made with a main landscape plane (4033x4033, 63 quads per section, 4 sections per component, 1024 components), which is approximately 36 square miles in real world units. To travel from Pallet to Indigo Plateau, running, with the default utgame character, takes approximately 15 minutes. This time will increase once Viridian Forest is added, as well as random Pokemon and trainer encounters.

Using the erosion tool, I mapped out the general shape of the peninsula, then subtraction eroded away the ocean. After that, I took the smoothing tool to the entire landscape to give it a more natural look, as opposed to sharp, jagged features. The main mountains (near Indigo Plateau) are kept in the consistent level, as is Cinnabar volcano and it's smoke plume. Everything else is streamed.

There are also two mountain landscape planes. These are streamed in when the player is near the respective coasts so that the whole peninsula doesn't just seem to turn into ocean. They give the illusion of more land beyond the boundaries of the main landscape.

Right now, there are placeholder city static meshes that mark the location of each city. These meshes came with UDK, and will eventually be replaced with static meshes that mirror the respective cities.

To stream, the landscape was broken down into large regions. The landscape regions were then moved to streaming levels. Each region generally has a city associated with it (except for routes 12 and 13). The regions are streamed in via trigger volumes and level stream nodes in Kismet. I used these as I felt they offered more control than a level streaming volume. The volumes overlap, so when you're in one region, it will begin loading nearby regions.

Each city also has it's own trigger volume (I used octagonal volumes for this). The trigger will load the city's map, and unload the city's static mesh placeholder, essentially swapping them.

To prevent noticeable streaming occurring (levels popping in and out), an exponential height fog was added.

The materials currently used are all stock textures that came with UDK. They were added to a new material, added to the landscape, then roughly painted on.