How do open world game engines allocate memory?

Question

My troubles

I've been trying to create a game engine but since I am not well experienced in C++ I am having trouble deciding on how to load new scenes efficiently level by level or just an open world.

Example

Recent games are heavy, Most populat games are about 40 to 100 gigabytes but neither RAM nor GPU have that much memory at least Normal PC or Consoles.

So obviously most game engines pre-allocate enough memory to fit the scene and sometimes just tolerate some wasted memory but how would you decide how much is enough?

Possible solution

I was planning to create separate game loops, before entering the game loop I would load each level, then start the loop, thus I would be able to deallocate preceding level and then reallocate new memory for a next level.

Since I am new to the world of games and memory management my solution may sound rather stupid, But I need to know how to handle such situations efficiently.

Answer 1

Creating a seamless open world without loading bars is not an easy task. There are lots of small and large problems which need to be solved. This is not a beginners project!

The basic approach is usually to divide the world into sections and only load those sections which are around the player. When the player moves around the world, new sections and their assets get loaded from hard drive into memory and further away sections get deleted.

When you want a high view distance which would require you to load lots and lots of sections, then you usually load the further away sections in a lower level of detail. Simplified geometry, lower resolution textures and no simulation of any moving objects. When the player comes closer, those low-detail sections get replaced with high-detail sections. This requires that you have multiple levels of detail for every section.

The radius in which you load full-detail, mid-detail and low-detail sections is a question of memory budgetting. You should nail down early how much RAM you expect the end-user devices to have at least and how much of that RAM you can budget for the environment. Do a back-of-the-envelope calculation how much RAM a section will take in each detail level. After you implemented the first sections, confirm those assumptions through profiling. This should tell you how many sections you can afford to load at once.

When you target the PC or Phone market, then the capabilities of end-users devices can differ by a lot. So you might choose to make the quality level ranges configurable for the end-user. You could also try to detect how much RAM the users device has and adjust view ranges dynamically.

It can be a good idea to move this constant loading, replacing and unloading of sections to a separate thread, so it doesn't slow down the main game. But now you need to deal with what happens if the player moves very quickly and manages to enter a section which isn't fully loaded yet. You could put the player in the low-detail environment, but this is going to result in a very poor game experience and game-breaking bugs. Showing a loading bar after all might be the better solution for this situation.