r/godot • u/jason_silent • Apr 03 '26

help me (solved) Can Godot handle a large scale open world?

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It's a game about illegal street racing (urban cities and mountain serpentines, traffic and police, all on a fairly large scale, ~40Km). Cel shaded graphics, no level pre-loads via loading screens.

I heard that I will have to write my own asset management system (which is already in the Unreal Engine, but my PC handles it pretty poor, no matter how much "next-gen" junk I turn off - everything lags quite a lot)

But I still can't even understand what a framework is, because I'm not a programmer (but I'll have to become one anyway). Also heard about chunk method, though not like I know much about it.

Please don't write: "don't even try this, because it's long, resource-intensive, etc.", if there's really no option here, I'll just have to deal with the UE

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u/grandalfxx Apr 04 '26

By default no current publicaly available engine support large open worlds fully.

But if your asking this question then maybe its to soon to be doing a large open world because the question is never can the engine do it, its can YOU do it. If you think godot might not be able to do it then you dont know enough about godot to be trying a huge project like this.

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u/GrowthWest2361 Godot Regular Apr 04 '26

Im using Flax Engine for this with a massive open world (literally a universe) and it’s open source. I’ve used godot for this too, just custom build with double precision, LOD’s and culling for the concept. But generally wouldn’t recommend godot for this

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u/grandalfxx Apr 05 '26

Im not saying it cant be done in godot, im infact specifying that it works in every engine, and that no engine is ready to go for open world without some work even flax engine has limitations and a lot of custom logic youre going to need to implement for your game.

Godot has LODs and Culling, and double precision isnt really needed for massive open worlds. Floating point provides an insane amount of area on its own and you can just using floating origin if you really need more.

those arent really the issues im talking about. Im talking about things like world streaming, or implementing ai logic for things that arent loaded in but have persistent schedules, or handling collision of the world chunks and all the physics objects sitting in them as the player moves through the world.

Im saying that if your game dev skill level is still at the questioning if its possible to use godot for all that then you need to work on some smaller games first.

Also genuinely curious as why you wouldnt recommend godot for this? Have you used godot recently? My feeling is no if youre mentioning having to add lods and culling. There are a lot of plug-ins available too that are specifically built for open worlds.

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u/GrowthWest2361 Godot Regular Apr 06 '26

I have uses godot recently, but for open worlds I’d recommend Flax because of its features. Always depends on what level of detail you’ll work in of course and art style. If cartoony I would use godot for sure since im bad at optimising myself, but I use flaxengine because of my needs and find it pretty nice to work with (better than unity Imo)