koobas.hobune.stream
Quick Terrain Sizing Question!
I am creating an MMORPG in unity, with Islands made out of the terrain. My Main island is 2000x2000 but there's going to be maybe 4x that in the whole game once all the other islands are added together.
I had the heightmap resolution set for 1025. It is far too detailed and causes a bit of lag for lower performance machines.
I can't decide whether to do 513 for the heightmap resolution, or 257 for all the islands. (1025 is way too much) I need opinions... :-)
Also i do use Occlusion culling if that makes a difference to your answer.
And you need all of these islands to be visible to all players at all times? That sounds like a lot of work. I'd be splitting them up into tiles and only loading the tiles that the player can see from their current location- it's going to get mighty slow if you are not careful otherwise.
Well I have the far clip plane on the camera at 375. I also use Occlusion culling. The players only see one island at a time, due to the distance between each of them. occlusion culling automatically seperates the terrain into tiles and shows only the tiles the camera can see. Im just not sure how low resolution i should go on the terrain to get better graphics speed.
Also is it a bad idea to just make one giant terrain ins$$anonymous$$d of having seperate terrains per island? it kind of gives a blocky look.
Sure I understand what Occlusion Culling does. It won't save you the memory for all of those islands or the cost of processing things in them though. It just has baked hints to tell it what doesn't need rendering. If there's a huge amount of stuff it still needs to be processed so it knows not to display it - massively cheaper than actually doing that with geometry, but still a cost.
But when you say $$anonymous$$$$anonymous$$ORPG I am thinking lots and lots of people playing - all of that happening everywhere in a single scene is going to be a problem isn't it?
Anyway , just a thought.
Well on the client's screen, it only sees his character, the visible parts of the island from occlusion culling, and the NPCs and the players in his camera view. The other players and npcs not in view are not loaded. When on one island, the other islands are automatically disabled. the entire ocean, is actually only 2 polygons, and looks very real still. It's not very laggy at all. I fixed the lag by adding occlusion culling, and lowering the heightmap detail of the terrain to 257 and 513.
