Okay so I came here to rant a little. But for a good reason.
I just spent 12 solid hours today trying to uniquely clone a terrain. Such a simple thing. Just a nice, unique clone. Should be easy. Should be one line of code. But no, 12 hours!
Sigh.
It turns out, Unity can’t make a unique copy of a terrain. No matter what, any edits you make will change the other clones also. It’s like some kind of sick joke the software is playing on you, taunting you with easy looking API commands to make a clone, laughing at you when you expect it to be unique, and then laughing even harder when you try to find another alternative other than writing some vast and complicated script to clone the terrain yourself.
Wasting so many hours of my weekend on this. My opinion of unity was 5 stars before this, and now it’s more like 1 star, because I’m upset. I’ve been a programmer my whole life and I have never, in my entire life, been more upset at any programming platform over a lack of a basic feature than this. It’s because Unity can clone the terrain, which puts you so close to what you want that you can just taste it. That makes you wrestle with it all day tying to get to that last little inch: unique clone. But you never arrive. You taste it until your mouth gets dry and your eyeballs fall out. But you can never have it. Never.
Sorry to hear that. Have you tried posting your problem on the forum or on Unity answers?
I know the feeling of frustration with a program because I often felt the same about MODO in the last few months. I still keep on using it and I still like it for everything that the program does very well (which is actually a lot). As for Unity - I know it sometimes has its limits and terrain overall has been neglected over the last few versions even though there have been some nice improvements. I personally find the lack of native decals, pathfinding in 2D or something like BSP brushes unfortunate as well. Though overall I feel extremely comfortable with Unity and I love it even more the longer I’m using it. I never thought that it promised a false sense of ease it could not maintain. I think Unity treads the path between professionalism, flexibility and ease of use extremely well. Especially compared to other software that promises ease of use but severely lacks in flexibility and/or possibilities in the end.
May I ask why you need to have exact clones of the terrain - or if there could be another way to achieve what you want to do?
It sounds like you want to have clones without a link to each other - meaning: clones you can change without altering the original terrain(s)? Did you try to go via RAW height- and splatmap export and import onto a new terrain?
Though I haven’t had this issue, Unity has certainly upset me due to lacking basic things it should definitely have. Disallowing equality checking in a background thread? Why? Disallowing accessing read only data like Application.loadedLevel in background threads? Why? Giving no access to mip map caps or distance between them. Not allowing you to access character controller’s skin width through code. I can go on and on.
I’m hoping they open source more of the engine; at least then we can handle things ourselves if Unity doesn’t let us initially.