Deleting terrain when out of render distance

[liciors]

I have a game in development where in order to save as much RAM as possible (I’m limited to 2 gigs on stand alone) I need to delete the terrain from the game world when it is not in a 3x3 area of terrain tiles based on player location, and I want the game world to be rather big. I’ve gotten the terrain to render, but deleting it from the game world is annoying… Here is basically what I got going on for deleting (testing out what works in this):

//Get level name public TerrainData startTerrain; void Start () { Terrain.CreateTerrainGameObject(startTerrain); } void Update () { if (Input.GetKeyDown("p")) { Terrain.Destroy(startTerrain); } }
Destroy(startTerrain); returns an error: “Destroy won’t let you delete an asset blah blah blah, use DestroyImmediate to destroy assets…”, and DestroyImmediate(startTerrain, true); completely breaks the asset and makes it impossible to use it again until I rename it, which I can’t have the end user do… I certainly wouldn’t rename the file in a stand alone.

[system]

It looks like you’re trying to create terrain objects from terrain data on the fly.

That’s a very expensive operation, and I would suggest creating prefabs for each terrain tile at authoring time (either using Unity editor or with a script), then instantiating and destroying terrain tiles as the player moves through the scene.

Unity - Scripting API: PrefabUtility.CreatePrefab

I’ve experimented with recycling terrain objects with an object pool in the past, but it’s actually faster to use Instantiate() than re-loading terrain data into an existing terrain object.

I would also look at some dynamic terrain tiling systems:

Simple mesh load on demand for terrain - Unity Answers

I hope this helps!