What do you think about this new powerfull way to generate nature environments ?
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I don’t know if I’d call it new as opposed to a really thorough and amazing implementation of ideas that have been around for awhile. But regardless, it looks incredible.
This is an impressive stat:
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Having spent … too many… hours in HZD I had no idea they were rolling the foliage like that. That’s pretty awesome.
Without the dialog with the presentation its a bit difficult to understand the details and application of the proc system but I basically understand it as the system is procedurally generating and placing assets safely in the world around the user rather than having a database of objects, their positions and their on/off state. Right?
Regardless, the environment quality, stability and overall polish of the environment in HZD blew my mind. I hope that at some point we get terrain pipeline tools half that good in Unity.
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I keep talking myself out of buying it, but it’s getting harder and harder to do so.
It’s going to ruin every other game you play for the next year, at least.
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At least you have the hardware. It’s getting annoying running into really awesome games only to realize they’re PS4 only. 
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Haha, I held out for years buying a PlayStation but finally caved after I couldn’t put off The Last of Us anymore. It was a $400 game for me.
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There has been some new people joining Unity for graphics techs, it could happen.
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Skimmed through it.
Looks like a logical next step in reducing artist workload via procedural generation.
The only possible issue is that trees may generate noticeable artificial pattern… but then again, you may need a bird eye view to spot it.
I like it using the power of the GPU to make creating large open worlds as easy as painting a texture.
Don’t see why you cant do this in Unity right now… everything seems driven by texture placement maps and noise.
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Looks really nice. Quite advanced. Now someone will implement this in Unity as the new terrain tool, or an asset store plugin.
In the gampe you see thousand of small stones on ground surfaces.
It can be used to bring lot of small details without needing tesselation and it is more flexible as meshes are not part of the ground texture and can be modified or changed any time.
This is one of a few cases where I’d have to cite the Garbage Collector as a significant issue. If you need to be constantly spawning new stuff… ugh. Hopefully that’s mitigated with the advancements coming in the next ~12 months or so.
@angrypenguin You can just spawn a few thousand disabled trees at start and swap them in a pool as you need them, which should avoid the Garbage Collector. At least in theory.
You can, but if you’ve got more variation than fits in your memory budget, or you want to have procedural variation, then you can’t just pool everything in advance. Then there’s also stuff that’s counter-productive to pool, like terrain tiles - sure you could do it, but the point of procedural terrain is that you don’t need to reuse the same set of pieces.
You’re right that you can design around it. I just get the strong impression that in this case designing around it defeats some of the strengths that procedural generation could otherwise offer.
Or you can manually turn on the GC at appropriate times, such as when you’re in a menu or waiting on a door to open.
As for the OP, I know that there’s a whole lot that I don’t know, but what am missing here about what the big deal is?
Also, HZD is just a Farcry clone. A really polished Farcry clone, but a Farcry clone none the less. I think it’s good, but I really don’t see why people are flipping out over it. I bought that and Master of Orion 2 on GoG on the same day and so far I’ve put in way more time on MoO2.
In the screen you posted shrubs are aligning in nearly straight line.
Basically with random placement it is very likely that a model (vegetation, tree, etc) will have a “cell” in which it can be spawned, and then its position within the cell can be adjusted by a semi-random value. This kind of thing might become noticeable, if you give the player an ability to look at the area from above, or move through the area very fast.
Basically, definitely a useful approach, but there are always drawbacks.
Also, it is restricted to heightmap based terrain, as far as I can tell.
The picture is about the litlle stones on the floor or big models where they used their GPU placement .
Dude, uhh… What? If you don’t like it thats one thing, great… But that assessment makes absolutely no sense.