Limbo Game Levels

[Glendora Starr]

HelloLet's get directly to the point - the Limbo Quest is the only one that is almost can not be done solo. The AW interception is hated. But this is not my issue with it...

It is the Excavation. Did anyone think, while nerfing the excavation missions (please tell me how it is not an nerf), how more annoying and grindy the quest to dig a hole for Limbo will become? If it was not enough, that only Frost could handle the Grinner heat, now we Tenno must wrestle even more in the mud of Earth to get the power cores. If the mobs feel like bringing those. Maybe, just maybe tweaking the modifiers for this mission will make more players use Limbo, and give better feedback on the Mad Hatter? Or you know break the meta?

Sidetracking - All quests to obtain Warframes can be done solo. Tenno can not wait for random party to show up at the quest sets to get Mirage, or Chroma. Mesa is another ordeal, that I really do not want to comment. But you can pull it off, the mission modifiers have not be changed after the quest is introduced - Deference did not become more difficult, survivals are the same old ordeal and Alad V is the same old prick. Why does Limbo (that already gets a lot of backslash) get even more random and grindy missions then the other frames?

I completed the quest on my own. But you are right, without a specific setup it is difficult, especially when excavators do not scale. By the end of the quest they can be destroyed in seconds. I used Saryn's Molt to draw fire from excavators, so there's that, but I imagine I would have bigger problems with other frames. Also, power core carriers were pretty scarce.

I didn't think I'd find a thread on this so quickly but here it is! Yes the way excavation missions are right now makes this a living hell when playing solo, the fact that the excavators can be destroyed in ten to five seconds (especially when your trying to retrieve a power core) and that sometimes the RNG forgets to spawn power carriers for a minute or two, can make one feel like they've entered a circle of hell where the running gag is that maybe the next extractor has the blueprint until it's destroyed in front of your very eyes (King Sisyphus punishment in Hades comes to mind).

Way I see it the best thing they can do is to have excavators scale like other defense objectives, changed the health type from flesh to machine and maybe have 40 instead of 20 energy off the bat things would not be so bad.

Limbo Theorem was a nighmare. The parts droprate is very low, took around 9 excaventions to get each part. And there is very little groups for that, since it is quest "do once, and never look back", so it is mostly solo. Extractors die very fast in Grineer quests. Frost helps, or... Limbo.

I've been trying get limbo for about.. 4 months now? and every time i try to get the second part it never drops. And then i get so salty that i dont want to touch the whole thing for weeks. **** this Quest.

I created a persistent level and then 3 steaming levels and tested but it does not seem like it releases the memory using the Stat Memory. How would you be able to tell if the level streaming is actually working?

your title says ue4 ,but in ue5 you have data layers that can be loaded/unloaded, and worldpartitioning which is very helpful.

in fact world partitioning will do the whole load/unload/stream for you.

Its possible to have just 1 persistent level. It does make designing easier, as it helps to conceptualize the whole game / level / world. Is it best practice? No. However, every use case is different. The limitations are more about the density of objects / actors in the scene.

If you work with sublevels you CAN have them all loaded at the same time, or selectively. You have to enable the Levels subwindow (off by default).

the problem with sublevels is that baking light is annoying.

multiple landscapes? use the landscape tool of ue. it is already heavily optimized, and it has partitions and subpartitions only rendering the ones needed.

the foliage system that comes with the landscape system is also pretty optimized.

i do need to tell you that it sounds like you dont have your expectations adjusted accordingly. if you plan on doing a game that does these types of things at such scale, you have to expect a considerable amount of effort to get it right, specially on optimization. on any engine. ue happens to have tools to help you but it will take time to learn and will not magically solve all your issues or work the exact way you want.

just because another game did it does not mean it did not came without pain.

i hope this does not sounds too harsh, its just my way of helping.

I was going to do the same thing with the new game which is a physics based motorcycle game, it is 2.5D kind of of like a combination Urban Trial Freestyle and/or Trials and Limbo/Inside, and I started thing how cool it would be to have the whole game one seamless experience like Limbo did.

Now here is what I am not forsure of, just loading those 2 levels would not be much and easy for the PS4 but does Level Streaming work like that, will it only load the assets in memory for just thoise 2 levels?

The reason I am still using UE4 is because of the Nvidia physics. They removed them in UE5 and replaced with their own built in Chaos Physics and when I tested them about a year ago they had all kinds of issues.

I agree, a whole level like Trials Fusion would be exhausting. The main character in MotoTrails can walk, climb, run and you will be doing a lot with him and then he can also ride the bike. I am working on the prototype now, the physics for the bike took a lot of time to figure out.

That is awesome you might enjoy parts of the ALS (Advanced Locomotion System) which is an animation framework for running , crouching and climbing. It has a free c++ version now on github and comes close to animation seen in Inside. Inside has some very pretty animation responses related to the scene intensity. Right after swimming, falling hard, escaping in Inside you see the effects. Love Limbo and Inside myself.

When the persistent level was loaded ran the Stat memoryPlatform command and it showed 1175 physical memory used which was the same before the big level was added, after triggering the big level volume the physical memory shot up to 2208.

So this confirms that level streaming is doing exactly what Unreal documentation says it will do and a full game should be able to be created in one streaming level as long as you have a beefy enough computer to handle all the levels being open at one time in the editor, that might be the problem with this. You might be able to make a huge level but trying to make a whole game may be too much for the editor.

At Level 1 when Saito is shot in the chest and Eames is about to shoot him in the head (in the warehouse) Cobb stops him saying that as they are all on sedatives killing him would send him to the limbo.

But eventually Saito dies of his bullet wound and Fischer too dies (atleast his heart stops beating). Now Cobb and Ariadne enter the limbo to get them back, once in the limbo Fischer and Ariadne jump off the building and get back to the previous level. Similarly Saito and Cobb shoot themselves to get back.

It is made quite clear that being stuck in limbo makes you easily forget what is reality and if you stay for too long, you basically loose your mind in there. So just entering it doesn't already come without dangers, let alone finding and bringing back someone from there.

Cobb: I appreciate that Saito, but when you wake up you won't even remember that we had an arrangement. Limbo's gonna become your reality, you're gonna be lost down there so long that you're gonna become an old man...

It wasn't just about killing Saito in limbo, but more about convincing him to accept reality again, the shooting (which Saito then did himself) was just the expression and fulfillment of this will to exit limbo. But I admit that with Fischer it was a bit different (which isn't yet entirely understood, though). But maybe just dropping him worked for Fischer because he wasn't there for too long and not already an "old man full of regret" who abandoned reality.

And at the end we see from Cobb's weary appearance that it took him quite some time and effort to even find Saito there, let alone convince him of reality. And not even that, from Cobb's dull and glass-eyed gaze and his slightly hesitant and absent behaviour during his conversation with Saito we also see that Cobb is himself on the verge of forgetting this "truth" he came to remind Saito of, I think. And that is ignoring Mal, who was at that point also still around there (and who knows if Cobb hadn't lost himself with her if Ariadne hadn't called him to reason).

It thus certainly wasn't an easy undertaking at all to find and save Saito from limbo, even if successful in the end. So if you have the chance to avoid that and succeed with the operation before Saito dies, that seems the far less risky alternative, especially since "down to the lower levels the pain will be less intense", as we could see from the to a large degree fully functional Saito on the deeper levels (until it got too much, but they could as well have already been done at this point).

In addition to that the whole procedure of saving Fischer wasn't a proved piece of cake either. This whole idea seemed largely improvisation on Ariadne's side and nobody, not even Cobb, seems to have been in such a situation before. So they weren't entirely sure if it works at all. They also had their difficulties and it took Cobb some effort to finally get over Mal. But in contrast to Saito's injury earlier this really was their last resort now, there wasn't any way to complete the task other than trying to bring back Fischer by any means necessary. Hadn't Fischer been killed and Saito stood a little longer it wouldn't need to have come so far at all. But don't let the fact that it worked in the end deceive you into thinking it was just a walk in the park.

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