Who are you?
Fat thing that’s not really fat, that lurks a lot on forums that people put up with because a) sometimes he’s helpful, b) they’ve no choice.
OR: Director at Simian Squared, purveyor of fine British console and mobile games.
What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
We’re doing a game for Sony that will use a heck of a lot of Unity 5.
How does terrain fit into that?
We’ve actually done a few years research here from rolling our own ROAM back when it was vogue, to stitching together loosely culled meshes to using a water-like structure of detailed geometry close up. We’ve also used Zbrush and World Machine among other applications in our research. We do a lot of R&D as we like to put something new out there. Ultimately, the reasons for avoiding Unity’s terrain always came down to poor tools, poor performance and no overhangs.
This upsets us greatly, because we know that the number one best way to create terrain in games is within the actual game editor and not externally. The nature of terrain is that it must be modifiable with short notice to fit playability, situations that cannot be forseen etc, and this is the main reason generating terrain in external apps is a poor workflow that creates stress within the team.
What use-cases, features, workflows do you have or would like to see?
Idealistic futuristic next gen terrain request:
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It uses voxels and we can just fly around digging the perfect terrain. There’s a few asset store entries but they’re unsupported and not ideal. We would love overhangs. We’d love to carve a world offline and online.
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It just works beautifully with enlighten.
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We have choice of vertex based splatmap and texture based splatmap, vertex based lighting and shadow (which can update if we carve or add new geometry)
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Triplanar and other options supported, including a nifty feature to match the uvs of any object to the terrain so meshes “just work” and fit - like in Skyrim’s toolset.
In short, fine-grained resolution isn’t as important as a living and breathing terrain that feels organic and raw and realistic, and caves and other exciting things are within reach just with a few brush strokes.
Wacom support is an absolute MUST or artists can’t function so well. Adjusting the strength constantly isn’t much fun is it.
Toned-down existing style terrain request in the realms of sanity:
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Maximum performance.
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It just works beautifully with enlighten.
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We have choice of vertex based splatmap and texture based splatmap, vertex based lighting and shadow which updates. But importantly there must be hole support as people do like their caves.
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Triplanar and other options supported, including a nifty feature to match the uvs of any object to the terrain so meshes “just work” and fit - like in Skyrim’s toolset.
So that’s two options. The thing is, if you’re going to overhaul the existing terrain it has to be something pretty next gen for people to bother, or at minimum very flexible. That’s the thing about terrain made in game editors, you want to tweak all that. We also need some form of broad world navmesh support going on here too among other features supported by Unity.
Just some thoughts.
