I am not making these post to front unity or sabotage its development. If people seriously say that we should seek another engine or whether I can do it better than unity, thats a weak comeback. Really, all I want is the engine to open up possibilities and make development as seamless as possible. The ideal game engine in my eyes would cater to the most common game mechanics / features (semi open world, or larger worlds in general just are the norm nowadays) so I feel as if Unity, being a game engine company, should maybe sit down and think of various of ways making the average life easier and pool their skills together and give us something robust.
I know even within the community there are many gifted and specialized people who like to do everything with their own system but lets say even if you re good with game logic and programming, that doesnt make megood in shaders or terrain generation etc. It may just not be something I would like to deeply think about when making games. If people want to do their own solution they should be free to do so but I feel an engine should at least offer something head to head as what the competition offers. How long did we have to wait for a shader graph? I think the unity user base is not very diverse and maybe why there arent many people complaining about these things. Most people here are probably more of a technical background. I have good experience in both so and I have used unreal extensively so I know where unreal is definitely better and where it isnt and I can say for sure that the Unreal team is doing a much better job identifying what the community wants and what overall yields better future for the engine. I can say 95% of game industry artist will choose unreal making environments. How huge is the ratio of game artists breaking down their unreal scenes for the community compared to unity? Most of these artist arent technical either, but they have been given tools so that they can leverage the engine quite well. I really hope unity adopts a more frictionless aproach as well.
good boy 
Iâm not asking for proofs⌠again, iâm not defending unity
As fas as i know, Unreal uses the same approach⌠painting holes and then pasting some geometry, is not exactly different from unity. (am i worng?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUP6drVDC4Q
o3de is IMO worse, is painting holes but with but a volume xD
CryEngine:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OKB5cJS3Ec
Yeah sure lets (slowly) make a hole and call it a cave, sorry but i can not see this as a useful feature, no on that context, but yeah it can be âbetterâ,but at leats on that video, imagine creating a complete cave interior like that.
asset from the asset store: i found DiggerPro which looks very cool and useful, is basically a sculpt app inside unity xD definitely better.
Edit: Maybe is not a highly requested feature (iâm talking about companies or studios that DO make games, at least successful games)
Company and studio, with at least successful games, will hire specialist to the job, and buy source code access to make their own version of the engine. They can afford because the cost would be relatively cheap (probably one dedicated person) and the return massive comparatively (whole team of artists having a workflow improvement). You can watch some of the making of to see that just happening.
It does affect collision and the overdraw issues are only going to be meaningful targeting extremely low end hardware unless you have a remarkably complex terrain shader compared to what Unity offers.
I recently played Breath of the Wild and Iâm fairly confident that itâs just large static meshes. Quite possibly just one for the entire world but itâs possible itâs one per zone or something similar.
its definitely terrain mixed with static meshes i believe.
The biggest problem with Unity terrain system is that it forces game developers to either build their own systems or try to piece together something using 3rd party assets. Unity needs to try to build a full game using HDRP, and take detailed notes of what they had to do to overcome the short comings.
It is not really possible for any game developer to build a complete game using HDRP with only Unityâs native solutions at this time. For example, set up a Unity terrain and add 8 texture layers. Then add one more texture layer to the terrain, and then watch the entire camera view turn completely black. Or try placing lot of trees and other vegetation on the terrain, and then measure the framerate.
There 3rd party assets to address these issues, but Unity cannot and will not fix these issues for the native built-in terrain solution. The cost of the assets is not the problem. The problem is that game developers end up at the mercy of 3rd party assets, and nobody knows when everything is going to break due to some update in Unity or other assets. Multiple updates in Unity 2021 broke 3rd party vegetation rendering assets. In fact, billboarding in Vegetation Studio Pro still does not work properly with HDRP without unofficial fixes from strangers on Discord. Unity repeatedly places VSP in sales, but the author of VSP has completely stopped answering questions or providing any updates.
If Unity tried to build their own full game using HDRP and their built-in terrain system, then Unity would know exactly what the problems were and would have quickly fixed this mess already.
Itâs a quadtree heightmap field with mesh as cliffâŚ
You can look at the file structure decoded by the mod scene:
https://zeldamods.org/wiki/TSCB
Use case: I need to move my cave / building with a basement / crater with underhangs / whatever.
Unity solution: Move the thing. Manually fill in the old hole. Manually create a new hole.
O3DE solution: Move the thing.
Thatâs it. Job done. No more steps. Thatâs why itâs better. If you only think about the hole in isolation then, sure, painting it makes perfect sense. But if you think about why you need a hole, and the workflows around what you do with them, then it becomes quickly apparent that painting them is a pain in the backside.
Importantly, that O3DE method (which is pretty similar to a part of the stuff I made for Unity) means that you can make the hole cutter a part of the object which needs the hole. So when I decide to move my building with a basement, or my cave, or whatever, then I donât need to go and paint a bit of terrain back in, and cut a new bit of hole, and then groan when itâs not quite in the right spot. You just grab the building and move it and the job is done.
It makes iteration time much faster, which means that you can spend less time doing silly chores and more time on things which make your game better.
I already pointed one out. Itâs certainly not âthe sameâ. As someone in the late stages of a project where weâve had to stick many things in the ground with holes, Iâll take the O3DE approach over the Unity one any day, thank you very much.
(Like I said, thatâs equivalent to just one part of the custom tools we made. The more detailed the tools are the more game-specific theyâll get, though, of course.)
This is the actual link - https://portal.productboard.com/dzcznunfgebtky7ipmhrc22z/c/2211-non-destructive-contextual-workflows
I might just make something like this myself. It canât be that hard. Just layering/masking black and white images.
Map Magic and other tools are constantly spamming console errors.
Very interesting. While playing I was paying close attention to the terrain to see if I could spot any seams or the shifting that comes from LOD but I never managed to spot any so thatâs why I assumed it was just static meshes.
Check out Jason Boothâs MicroVerse, does this already
Digger is a hybrid between voxel for overhangs, and heightmaps for the rest.
this. Thats the reason the unreal team quickly addresses problems. They have a core team that actually uses the engine themselves. Whatever fortnite gets, chances are UE devs will also get
This looks interesting actually, will check it out, thanks. The problem still remains though. What if dev decides to stop support or the engine breaks this soon?
Then you move to an engine that has the tech you need by default, and doesnât charge you both to use the engine AND every time users install your game.