koobas.hobune.stream
One or multiple terrains?
Hi, Im new to Unity3d and plan on a very long trip (a game that will take years and years...)
I would like to create a huuge world, so does anyone have experience of that?
Some Q:s - Is it better to create many "smaller" terrains instead of one huge terrain? (on 1 huge terrain there arent any problems with edges not matching the next terrain).
On many smaller ones, one could (instantiate, create things (houses/castles) to appear only for particular terrain u stand on), can for sure be done other ways also.
Is it heavier to render 1 huge terrain with (~12 textures) than (16 smaller terrains with lets say 4 textures each)
What other things + and - are there with the one big or many small options?
Thx for any views!
I read just the FIRST sentence you wrote. And here's what came up in my head (just sharing a thought ok nothing else, I'm somewhat whimsical) Why build a game, that's never done but is released, and always keeps getting better? Always update or a game the user can define as how to play from A-Z like a giant map editor with a RUN button
Also I would suggest flagging/tagging this an optimization question, Looking for Tag
For my case I started from this;
http://scrawkblog.com/category/terrain/
I used real GIS data to import and I used 3 different splatmaps. The main problem with the multiple tiles is the placement and creating tiles. Because if you have a rectangular terrain, you cannot create it with only one terrain. So you need tiles which has resolution of (2^n+1). Then you have to stitch them. Stitching is a very easy concept. You can find an example code in the holy information source that I gave you above.
For your questions, I believe as there is an occlusion culling in the forward rendering pipeline, one big terrain or small terrains will have no difference. But I would strongly prefer small terrains, as it is easy to use or code.
For your other question, as I am a GIS person myself, in these situations I'd prefer using exact coordinates for the objects (houses, items, roads, etc.). After you placed your objects first, then create a predefined complete terrain there and transform the objects accordingly.
This question asked four years ago, I'm aware of that. But I spent weeks to create a system like this, and there was no help here. I believe people will need some terrain capabilities of Unity eventually.
For what you're asking we have something called an endless world concept. We create terrains piece by piece and from either an asset bundle from your asset server in unity or from some other location using say "www".
The rest of it have pretty much detailed theory so you might want to try out the idea first and ask more detailed questions on the forum as you go along.
I use L3DT to create one Huge terrain heightMap and use the setting to split the terrain into smaller terrains. Then there is a script in the Wiki (I believe) terrain stitching. However I use the one that I found on this forum Eric5h5's terrain stitching utility from his website: Stitchscape. This works well for me.
