New Worldbuilding Update (Q3 2024) Info Revealed at Unite

There definetely should be a way to stream colliders and physics in an open world games. Or maybe just enabling them by distance could work? I don’t know. In cyberpunk for example every single cactus in the world has colliders and physics and can be broken by car.

Why not tap into the existing wind system? It’s old but still pretty decent, and would avoid incompatibilities with other parts ot the engine.

:exploding_head: That’s mind blowing to me!
Having very little control over the scattered objects is a big issue in the current system, but I ended up thinking their was no way around it.
It seems I (once again) underestimated the power of entities.

I’m super excited about this! :laughing:

Also, I fully get @EricDziurzynski’s point that this tool is still far from ready.
Please, take your time.
Having this kind of tool is extremely cool and awesome and everything, but it’s not a deal breaker to not have it.
Even if I’m sometimes disappointed with the development speed of some Unity tools, I’m always amazed at the quality of the end result.

And another question, when will you put up another worldbuilding discussion to discuss more ideas for future versions? I have more ideas and fixes that I would like to discuss for future versions.

@Wolfos, we’re looking into all the implementation options for the wind system including if and how we can leverage the existing system. We’re definitely aware it needs to be compatible with other existing unity systems like VFX.

@PaulMDev , thanks for the kind words and we appreciate your patience!

@asiertroiti , you can definitely make and discuss feature requests in this thread if it’s helpful to discuss them. However, the fastest way is to make comments on the public roadmap here: 3D worldbuilding roadmap | Unity

We will be updating the public roadmap soon and adding other features and cards to represent what we’ve already heard in this thread and with other topics that have been in our internal roadmap and backlog. I will plan to be making posts like this one once per quarter moving forward with any updates I can share. We can’t promise every quarter will have as much info or as much to update publicly but we do want to maintain a dialogue and understanding of where you all want and need us to go, and where we think we can realistically get to next based on our team, tech, and current dependencies.

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I have several new ideas and fixes for future versions of Unity:
1. Being able to create spherical terrain, and so that my perspective is understood, I have seen that there are currently many open world games, whether MMOs, survival, adventure, etc… At the time they released open world games and the maps were instanced, now little by little open world games without instances are coming out which is quite good, but I think there will come a point where there will be many and most will end up being repetitive and I said to myself, I think it’s time to start going to the next level for open worlds, and these would have to be at a planetary level, planets that you can fully explore and edit their terrain in Unity to your liking in order to create impressive worlds. Obviously we would have to see how to optimize this and even more if we could create more than one spherical terrain (planets) to simulate a galaxy with planets and so on. We would also have to see how to make the clouds and water in HDRP adjust to the spherical shape of the terrain and make each one independent for each planet. I think we could add an option to add atmosphere or something… The general idea is that open worlds are no longer flat with mountains and such and that’s it, but that when you look into the distance of the map you can see the curvature of the planet and thus give more “realism” to the games that are made.
2. I don’t know if this will be something that will be changed in future versions since in the last roadmap that you published it was not clear to me if this would be fixed, but I will mention it anyway, when placing vegetation such as trees and especially rocks, if you place them on a terrain with a certain elevation they seem to float and it looks ugly for the game, it occurred to me that a new keyboard shortcut could be added so that when placing these trees and other objects before placing them you can sink them into the terrain so that they do not seem to float, another way that occurred to me is that, as with the paint for painting grass, the trees or rocks also have a configuration to indicate that they follow the direction of the terrain to avoid the problem of appearing to float, although I think that this would be better for rocks than trees, and I am not sure if that option that the grass paint has with which you can indicate to follow the direction of the terrain is exclusive. from the terrain tools package… In any case, whether it is or not, this should be updated for trees.
3. I think this has already been commented by some other developer at some point, but I will add it here, that just like it happens with the painting of grass, in the painting of trees you can choose more than one type of tree when painting, until now having to paint each type of tree one by one is very annoying… As an addition to the terrain, specifically in mass place trees, you could make the available trees and objects visible and you could choose which trees to place and which not. And taking advantage of the fact that I am talking about mass place trees and this goes a bit hand in hand with 2. depending on how it is done, you could add configurations so that what is painted with mass place trees sinks into the terrain and is not floating.

This is difficult. Firstly, it is not a feature that most developers need. Secondly, the unconventional gravity direction can completely change the development logic. I have tried the Ring World and Ball World, but there were many problems and the development period was too long

@asiertroiti , thank you for the feedback. Very helpful as always and I will capture these notes against our backlog.

We’ve heard the same feedback on Spherical terrains from other developers and studios in the past so this is on our radar but to the point from @qjlmeyes , this is difficult and not a common problem for the majority of studios and developers which lowers the prioritization for now. But we do acknowledge that is a limitation of our system being based on a top-down projection.

To your second point on the depth of placement during scatter, this is very valid and a shared problem so it’s something we are looking to address in the new system. This is planned to be delivered in the new system.

On your third point, scattering multiple types of assets, this is also valid and a known pain point that we are addressing in the new system as well.

We appreciate your patience and feedback!

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Any changes in the height limitations? I’m using real world bathymetry and from bottom of ocean @-10921 to tallest mountain @8627 the combined 19k+ meters is very limiting and I’m still struggling to make it work.

Will the DOTS worldbuilding include water?

I completely agree with you. Whether we like it or not, RVT is a situation where we must use it.
The resolution of timeghost’s splat map released this time was 4096.
I wonder if they made it that way on purpose or with RVT in mind in advance.
As a side note, because the RVT sample shown in Unreal is object blending, many people misunderstand that RVT was created only for object blending.

What the system expects as its “input”?

Say if I create the height map in other software then import to the system, does it expect a regular Texture2D? Or is there some sort of asset contain info about the height map, weight map & trees?
It would be nice if there is an interface so terrain tool assets can integrate, which output maps directly to the system without “export to file → import → reassign” steps.

Or in more detail, I have a graph based terrain generator (Vista) that run all sort of simulation, generate all the textures and output directly to the “Terrain” component. If the interface described above is available, I can make a node like “Output To World Layer”. That way the tool can be use for both terrain system and I don’t have to switch between applications.

Agree. World building task need lots of contents & additional tools in aid of Unity’s core system. A dedicated page for publishers to plug their contents can help users find things quickly.

Indeed, especially with Unity’s Splines there are so many possibilities. Here’s what I did yesterday with their Splines:

It’s such a huge time saver and efficient workflow if you just make use of it. Little coding here and there, but the results are obvious :slight_smile:

What I really do miss that was shown in Unity’s video is virtual texturing for blending everything into the terrain.

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