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How does terrain work in subnautica
Subnautica made on unity, but apparently uses its own terrain. It is not built on a height map, because it may have "ceilings" and different caves. And it can be dynamically changed in the game. How does their terrain work? The only thing that comes to mind is the creation of a huge mesh that, when changed, will re-triangulates, but this would cause a lot of lags, so it works differently
you can do almost anything with the mesh without so many lags, tested planets (scalled small) up to 65k triangles on a i3 works fine, terrain meshes doesn't seem to be a problem the problem is, also there are a mesh collider, with the same number of verts.
I had played subnautica, after the wonderful shaders (with some overlapping with fog), but transparent windows like decals worth it, I was pleased to the way they naturally insert objects inside others, you have a base mesh with the terrain, with a repeated texture, and above a lot of inserted coral tunnels, mountains, formations, floating islands... etc
They also used LOD, enough to saw it pops if you travel fast with the seamoth (on the xbox version can be easy seen), so they probably allocate multiple terrains, one by each biome? and use LOD, detaliled estructures inserted above... and if you overhead the core, you can go trought meshes before colliders reach to calculate, so, probably colliders are calculated on a different way, maybe with their own gameobjects..., that I never get how they did it.
The question should be : How do terrain-building games handle their meshes?
Personally i've never tried, but you might find good stuff id you try differents tags in google.
Found this by doing a quick research : https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/19930/where-to-start-when-building-a-3d-terrain-editor
(Beware this looks like it's avanced material) Hope you'll get your answer!
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