If you compare both demos, you can see that everything shown in the second one was there to organically showcase a engine feature. The open world desert for streaming level chunks. Large assets for Mega Assemblies. The Titan for Animation and Sound Generation. Dark World for Level Layers. Hell even the path that the Character took was designed to show off skeletal features and packages.
I'm not sure I got enough to understand in the clip, does anybody have a good understanding of Level Layers?
I get the demo of it: there's the usual sunlit world of regular rocks and boulders, then you enter the "Dark World' and it switches layers and you've got darkness and cragged fantasy rocks and gateways and such. It's "two layers" of a world.
Problem was, it took a few seconds to transition layers. So, why make "Level Layers" if they're not part of the level that's already there than can be turned on/off at a rapid switch?
Usually if you needed to do a magical switch between areas in a game, you'd have both areas (or chunks of the areas) stored on the same map, and you'd just discretely move the character from one area to the similar-but-different-looking area. (The
Arkham Asylum "Nightmare of Bruce Wayne" Scarecrow sequence does this, by switching the corridor you walk down several times so it looks more and more like Crime Alley. The Medium is all about this.) Or, you would use lighting and color or texture swaps to make the world seem different. Or you would assign some objects in the world to invisible unless triggered to put clutter or whatever where it wasn't.
Layers is kind of that, and kind of not, and I'm not sure what the full purpose of it is yet? It's not the "same" level landscape, they swap in totally different geometry and textures (they also completely replace the weather-modeled sky with a skybox.) And the speed of the transition is nowhere near instantaneous, 3 seconds at best (when you run this Layer transition for the first time, it can painfully take several minutes to bring in the Dark World.) So if it's not the same map layout, and it's not the same assets, and it's not an instantaneous swap where your character is in the same position with the same momentum/interactivity but the map is swapped underneath (not that it's hard to 'bamf' a character from one set to another in a game map if you had to,) then what does the "Level Layer" do?
I get that I'm thinking of this as a gamer. Layers have a development purpose, not necessarily for me the gamer. I could see Layer being really handy for iterating areas while constructing locations (I imagine that's its primary purpose.) It's also easier to have an area that has levels you can turn on and off when you're restaging an area for multiple purposes. (As an example, "Ok, this is my city map before the nuke, and this is my city with all the buildings converted to rubble and... oh crap, I forgot that I moved that bridge over there in the pre-rubble map, I've got to go back and match that up again...", that sort of thing. I'm not sure that this would fix the problem though, unless you joined the bridge and wrecked bridge actors together across layers?) And I guess being able to have whole layers toggleable with a button press is easier to work with than having chunks of map hidden and strewn all about your loaded level. I can think of ways that Layer can get you through development a little easier, but all the ways I'm thinking of have alternate approaches to them already.
Is it just that these two layer sets are so different and so massive that, in this particular case, you can't work with both at the same time (or play them instantaneously, if you're a gamer getting the new "Land of the Ancients" videogame...) unless you have an even more powerful rig than Epic Games or any tester has used so far?
(*To be less confusing though, the editing tool here is just called "Data Layer", not "Level Layers". It's Is
Layers for anything in UE that's clustered into a scene that a designer would toggle in the same workspace. Kind of like having multiple browser tabs open, I guess?)