Worldbuilding Status Update (Q3 2024)
Today we finally revealed or confirmed a few details of the new Worldbuilding System that we’ve been working on, during the Unite Keynote and Roadmap sessions . This is currently not available in Unity 6 but is slated to be part of the next generational release of Unity. Initially we are looking to address the needs of technical environment artists working at studios that are already using Unity to create large, complex worlds. We understand that this is a very narrow range of our users. We are simply starting here and will work towards expanding the range out to many more users but it will take quite some time. We will also be working very closely with our key asset store developers as they tend to be able to work much faster than we can to address the needs of many more users.
I wanted to take some time to break my silence and to clarify and summarize some of the key concepts in more detail than we had time for during the live presentations. Also to give you all a chance to ask further questions and provide feedback on what you’ve seen and heard. So here we go.
A new worldbuilding system:
Yes, this is a new worldbuilding system to replace Terrain in the next generation of Unity. We’ve spoken with a lot of the studios building larger, more ambitious worlds in Unity and did take a long hard look at what we could and couldn’t do to improve Terrain and did choose to move forward on a new system. While there are some, who “… think the Terrain system is fine” , they tend to be outliers overall. Terrain has been around since the start of Unity and there were many technical choices in the system that we couldn’t upgrade or modernize. We want to provide something that will work for the needs of today and much further into the future and because of this, we knew we needed a full overhaul.
Creation Tools:
The initial releases will focus on the import pipeline or being able to get your content into Unity from industry standard tools like Quadspinner’s Gaea or Houdini or any similar tool. We have no intention of competing with these types of tools and running complex erosion simulations directly in Unity anytime soon. We want to provide more ability to import not only height maps but also masks, and pre-scattered assets.
Once your content is in Unity, you’ll be able to use our non-destructive layer stack to order your materials, paint or generate masks, and set up rules for these layers based on altitude, slope, and curvature. Once these layers and rules are set up, as you move stamps around, everything will just adapt based on these rules. This offers much more flexibility later into production.
We’ve also integrated Shader Graph into the system, one of the longest requested features on our public roadmap. Shader graph will be integrated into the terrain surface with our new system. It will also help enable more seamless blending of meshes with the terrain surface.
Runtime Performance:
Some key modern features that will help enable runtime performance are Virtual Texturing and our new Tessellation system. The layer stack is all baked down into tiles that can optimize performance at runtime instead of blending and drawing many textures and materials. This is coupled with a powerful tessellation system to render more detail and geometry where you need it most, near the camera. Further away, it’s vastly simplified and helps you optimize performance for your target platform or platforms.
Powered by ECS:
Yes, this new system is built to take advantage of the entities component system (ECS). We’ve hinted at this in the past as we knew there was no way we could build a new worldbuilding system that could scale to the needs of tomorrow without this at the core of the system. If you want to scatter millions of SpeedTree assets or boulders, storing them as entities helps process and render them with optimal performance.
Platform Reach:
This isn’t going to work perfectly on all platforms from day one but we want to provide a system that is both powerful and flexible. If you are targeting high end PCs and consoles, we want to give you something that can let you stay ambitious and add detail while providing a framework that can be adapted to your needs. If you want to target mobile, Switch, or Quest, it needs to be able to be pared down or modified to adhere to more stringent optimization processes. Our intent is to give you a system that can be adapted with global settings to quickly customize your scene to build for each platform.
Questions:
How do you feel about these details for the creation tools? Initially this may seem like a much different system than Terrain and may not have all of the features you expect.
How do you feel about the underlying technology? Do you anticipate still needing more?
What are we not talking about here that concerns you most?
Release timeframe:
While we have been developing this system for quite some time, we weren’t able to include all of this in Unity 6. However, we are hopeful that we will be ready for the generation after that, and look forward to making this broadly available. We will keep you posted when we have a more concrete release schedule.
Ongoing:
We’re extremely happy to finally reveal more information about what we’ve had in progress but we’re still just scratching the surface of what we assume is needed to address everyone’s needs. We will do your best to take and log feature requests and keep our roadmap updated. I’ll be updating the current roadmap to reflect all of these changes listed and adding new items for consideration and as ‘in progress’ as we move forward from here.
Thank you!
For keeping an eye on these posts and for all of your feedback and help over the past couple of years. Special shoutouts to: @jalbastefan828, @PaulMDev, @AdrielCodeops, @mgear, @MechaWolf99, @useraccount1, @Jack_Martison, @jwinn, @sarbiewski, @jbooth1, @MrPapayaMan, @LumaPxxx, @JaredMerritt, @Rowlan, @asiertroiti, @ZhavShaw, @ron-bohn, @Redrag0n, and @SapphireGames2025. All of your comments, feature requests, and feedback have been extremely helpful! I will continue to log your feedback and feature requests as part of our product backlog. If you’d like to do so more directly yourself, please do that via our product roadmap .
This system has been a very long time coming and has a long way to go to being something every Unity user can take full advantage of. We sincerely appreciate all of your patience, support, and passion for using the Unity game engine.
Eric
Product Manager, Worldbuilding