SLUG: rooted-alpha-phase-2-map-unreal-engine-5
SUMMARY: Headway Games shares technical details on open world management for Rooted’s Alpha Phase 2, launching with Unreal Engine 5.4.
Headway Games published a technical overview for Rooted on April 17, 2024, detailing how they’re handling the open world for Alpha Phase 2. The first alpha session only had the Monastery available. Now players get a much larger slice of the map to explore and test the building system. The developers suggest scouting for base locations but warn that points of interest could still appear before Early Access.
World Partition and a Server Snag
Rooted runs on Unreal Engine 5, which uses World Partition technology to split the map into a grid. Zones load and unload based on where you’re standing, which helps keep performance in check. That’s working well in Alpha 2, except for one problem. The current UE5 build doesn’t support Server Streaming. That means whoever hosts the game has to load the entire map to track player collisions across different cells.
The fix is coming with Unreal Engine 5.4, announced at GDC 2024. The team tested a pre-release build with Server Streaming enabled and got promising results. They’re waiting on UE 5.4 to ship for Alpha 2.0.
Building Their Own Tech
To avoid getting stuck waiting on engine updates, the team partnered with Victor Careil, the developer behind the Voxel Plugin for Unreal. Together they built a Pool system that manages how environment props appear around the player. Tables, chairs, pens, glasses, and PCs all get loaded on the fly.
The numbers are telling. The Monastery alone involves over 16,000 actors. The final game will have several hundred thousand. But the Pool system only needs a few thousand actors, reassigning appearances as you move. It also works in editor mode, which speeds up map development in dense areas.
