Making an open world map. Could use some input.

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Hey everyone,

so this weekend I decided that I’d go ahead and make an open world map. So far I’ve made a land mass that’s 5x5km with 100 terrains each 500x500 meters and placed into their own scenes that load as the player approaches, then unload when they walk away. I made sure to grow the distance after crossing the threshold and I made sure no two chunks will load at the same time. It’s looking rather pretty if I do say so myself.

Questions I have for you:

1) Do you think that 25 square kilometers is a good size?

I believe that’s a little over the size of Horizon’s map which is about 24.

Ultimately I’m looking to have an open world game that plays like Doom, but with a fantasy setting and with dungeons to crawl like stages.

So the player will be really fast, Doom-guy fast, which will let the player zip around fairly fast. But I’m also not looking to make a AAA title here. Just something about 15 hours long.

2) What tools/pipeline should I use to fill in the map?

I’m not looking to pour any money into this so I don’t expect to be able to use any assets that are more than ~$10.

For height maps I’m thinking that I’ll edit out a greyscale map in GIMP. Maybe make an image that’s 5130x5130 and paint on it. I think that should work well enough.

As far as the splatmaps go, I can easily do some color range selections to create maps based on height, but I have no clue how I could do so with slope. Any suggestions how I could create a splatmap that includes slope?

3) What should I grab to make the terrain not look like garbage?

I think that some definite must-have features that I’ll need are Alpha Blending, MAYBE tri-plainer mapping, and DEFINITELY some more texture options than just Albedo and Normal.

I’m guessing that everyone is going to say RTP, RTP, RTP on that one though, huh?

4) What sort of other things will I want to add to liven up the environment?

I’m thinking that I’m going to create a terrain to draw in the distance, and maybe some 3d clouds. Of course if I make clouds in that layer I’ll need to figure out how to cast shadows onto the playing field based on the same clouds, but I think I can manage.

Time of day.
Weather.
Lens flairs.
Streams.
God rays.
Volumetric Fog.

Any other suggestions?

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UE world composition or Cryengine for that matter, both have better terrain tools and all the rest of things needed for large open world terrain projects… It’s good you’ve solved the loading in/out of terrain chunks, though I don’t see you not getting away from needing to use at least 1-3 of the popular terrain assets for Unity to make any headway with it, and that’s just terrain… the time of day, weather, volumetric fog, trees and shit are all extras you’d need as well. If you keep it purely non modern with no roads and modern building crap you could maybe achieve it, and head towards high end mobile quality for a release date somewhere in the next 1-3years depending on compromises and experience. By the time you get the actual singleplayer gameplay stuff in (no idea if multiplayer is an intention, add another 1year research/bug delay hassles and another 2years after that for unet to show signs of reaching phase2) . No idea how you would go about doing underground dungeons with fuck all decent tools for carving holes into the shitty terrain system both of which are supported natively in UE and Cryengine.

And just hope the performance is not garbage, and the memory usage will be inline with newer computers having at least 16gb memory in the coming years to support anything highish quality…

Rust already needs a minimum spec of 16gb ram and another 16gb ram drive to put the page file on, so it doesn’t feel like playing a stuttering slideshow of poor optimization and bad game design with end user memory usage and engine being used in mind. Compare that to even larger world terrain games made on engines that aren’t Unity, and yeh you won’t have to compromise on the vision or subject your players to awful experiences as much. Not saying it’s not possible to do it better on Unity, is a few games that have managed to work around all the problems and have somewhat big terrain worlds, but they’ve all usually had some talented people on a team to achieve it. For a solo dev I don’t see how you can’t escape doing it at all without at least using quiet a few third party assets.

Personally shelve the idea of large open world terrain game with unity or stick to using 1 terrain as merely a placeholder for when unity do get there shit together on it in the coming years, while working on the actual gameplay, character interaction aspects, dungeon mobs etc. All of which could go towards pivoting the large open world terrain game idea to something more achievable and smaller.

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Dude, I’ve been over all of this and I know what I’m doing as well as know exactly what my scope is.

RAM is not the issue that you think it is. I’ve already done stress tests on my meager 4 GB laptop.

And I am aware of the time frame involved. Your estimates are grossly exaggerated.

I asked for suggestions on how to get the broad strokes of the terrain, not whether or not I can do it.

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If you want assets to sort out the terrain for you then I reckon you’ll want to spend more than 10 bucks

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If it’s not just overland, that’s potentially bordering on too much - should be good as long as the player(s) can realistically get around everywhere :slight_smile:

Which Horizon? Forza Horizon 1-3, Elite Dangerous:Horizons or Horizon:Zero Dawn? :wink:

A crawl around a relatively small area can go on all night. I once spent five hours in an Oblivion dungeon, and I guesstimate the dungeon levels in Eye of the Beholder to be around 50m x 50m with nearly as much time to get through. It doesn’t seem like much, but the obstacles you put in can drastically increase the time it takes to play.

Something more like Hexen then? You need to find a balance between overland and dungeons in that case. With a 25km² map you don’t exactly zip across it if it’s full of terrain, caves and dungeons. You’ll figure out the right balance as you build it though :slight_smile:

There are a lot of terrain tools, but I suspect you want more manual control over paths and placement of just about anything, so you’ll need ones which do both or can be combined with other tools.

I’m currently liking Gaia, but Terrain Composer 2 is also nice and has a node-based approach to creating the terrains procedurally (and hence height maps). Both are worth investigating deeply, but neither is super-cheap. GeNa adds on top of Gaia to create the fiddly bits (more manual placements), making it a bit pricey total. If random clutter is mostly in the dungeons you can probably manage without GeNa.

Map Magic is a third option which I know little of, but which looks handy. Node-based like TC2. RTP-ready.

Just take a few bills out of the stack of $100 notes you use to prop up the guest beds in your castle? :stuck_out_tongue:

Maybe you only need a few pricey tools. Watch out for sales. Investing in some good PBR stuff is good, as it applies to many projects.

Pretty much RTP or CTS for terrain, yeah. They’ll handle slope transitions, procedural ground texturing based on height (snow in the highlands if you like), and generally stop your terrain from looking butt-adjacent.

UniStorm just got a big update again, and I’ve found it decent enough. It has weather, wind, fog, event scheduling, clock and calendar, seasons, climate, day/night, moon phases and a star system. Everything can scale to all sorts of earthly climates (and probably something unearthly with some tweaks). Basically contains the everything.

I don’t know of any other weather systems with as many features, but Weather Maker is pure weather and volumetric fog/lighting/clouds.

Lens flares are considered an undesirable phenomenon in CAMERAS. Eyes? Not so common. Games? Toggle defaulting off, please. Or non-existent, preferably. J.J. Abrams is one of the most hated people on Earth for a reason. Users of lens flares will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.

Other tools:
What’s your total budget? It’s going to cost ya. More than $10 for most tools.

-UBER shader, which can be had cheaper if you already have RTP
-AQUAS water is pretty nice, and the $5 LITE edition might serve your immediate needs (you can upgrade to the pro thing later for the difference if you need rivers and more features, as I think LITE basically gives you a big puddle)

For the rest of the visuals you just need nice textures/models/shader use (not overdoing the shininess), post-processing, particle effects and well-designed lighting.

If you like the idea of fiddling around with procedural textures I can also recommend Substance Designer. This video really shows off what it can do.

EDIT: Real Ivy might also be an excellent addition to your toolbox.

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Well open world maps come in many different forms, and yeah lol the ram was only a slight exaggeration for rust that I was taking piss with… most games seem to manage to stay within reasonable limits of under 8gm (cus OS+background shit can take 1-2gb ram) for current pc gamer hardware those guys have gone off base without a fuck given to players under there dev hardware spec.

“I’ve already done stress tests on my meager 4 GB laptop.”

Well atleast the vision for the game will be put under some hardware constraints.

“I asked for suggestions on how to get the broad strokes of the terrain”

The most popular tools required for terrain with unity aren’t exactly rare finds, they are often most popular threads in the asset forum, and highest rated on the asset store, so its not like its really a question of what to use imo, and you been around here much longer, so figured your post was really just looking for someone to put you off doing it with unity :stuck_out_tongue:

Good luck

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Few minor details:

I’m not sure if GIMP supports grayscale 16 bit which you’ll want to use for terrain.

It should be a good idea to try painting heightmaps in blender -
You’ll have immediate 3d preview, while in gimp you would be painting blind.

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Yeah, I’m find this to be the case. I see lots of people CLAIM they make height maps in GIMP, but their .data file is not a replacement for raw no matter what people say. I tried it and got a weird mess where 1/2 of the heights were correct, but every other row of pixels dropped the terrain a couple hundred meters.

I will give blender a try, although I am lousy at it.

Thanks Neg.

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Rust also has significantly different gameplay requirements from a more traditional open world game. Skyrim was able to fit entirely within the memory limitations of the PlayStation 3 (256MB system, 256MB video) and XBox 360 (512MB shared between system and video).

Additionally, Rust is an early access game and early access games are rarely optimized.

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Okay, so I gave Blender a crack and…

HOT DAMN!

Thank you so much for the suggestion @neginfinity , I think this is how I’ll be doing height maps for now on.

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:lol: Enjoy :lol:

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you stitch the parts together? … i mean, the edges of each part lines up?
how do you do that? … well… i havent messed with Unity Terrain in a looooooong time

there is somedudes asset that auto does it, its like 10, 15 bucks
i never knew how to do that back when i was messing with terrains

well i guess its how you make your heightmaps, i was going for randomized stuff, so yeah…

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Stitching is pretty easy. From memory Unitys terrain system lets you define neighbours, then it will automatically stitch the neighbours together for you.

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I need to know more about it :hushed:

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Really? Unity’s default terrain system does this?? Like, stitching 2 terrains borders together putting them in the same height?

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https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Terrain.SetNeighbors.html

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The quality isn’t the best, but this guy made it easy enough to do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5E1Rh0v4pk

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???
@protopop has accomplished terrain using Unity on mobile -

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I thought it generate 16bits raw :(, it’s 8bits png, that’s bad

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Hm, according to the documentation, it seems like this only makes the lod matches between terrains, I thought that it would put the terrain borders in the same height.

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