[OLD-FORUM-THREAD] Ultimate Terrains 1.0

Community Showcases
21

This looks very interesting.

Maybe I can use it for a new race type game.
I have some questions:

If I need to model an island of 4 km x 4 km, what is the size of the finest details? Is it 0.5 meter?
Can I make this smaller? I want destructible parts that result in smaller holes.

How does it integrate with Unity 5? Especially the new light system?

Is it fully integrated with the Unity editor? So that I can change details of the terrain at any time?

How many texture layers are supported?

Can it use the textures from Substance (procedural texture generation).

Can I define the location of mountains etc using some template or mask file?

Is it handled in Unity as a mesh? Can I use physical based materials on it?

22

@DDDiscover
If you want your entire island to be visible at any time, then yes the finest details would be 0.5 meter. But if you don’t mind some far away areas of your island aren’t visible, you could even set finer details. It’s just that all your island won’t be visible at the same time.
However, I have to warn you: this kind of terrains takes time to be computed and updated in real-time while the player is moving around. This means that it might not be appropriate for a race game with so small details, because the player would move too fast comparatively to the size of the finest details. This would result in the terrain being “late” and your player wouldn’t be in the center anymore. This would lead to issues.

In conclusion, either you make a race game with player moving fast but with big voxels (ie. big details) or you make a game with fine details but your player will have to move more slowly.

It is entirely compatible with Unity 5, but I haven’t tested it with the new light system yet. I’ll let you know about that.
Yes it is integrated with the Unity editor.

With the included shader, you can use 5 different textures. I haven’t tested it with Substance.
But in any case, you can use any material you want on it, so you can use your own shaders if you want, including physically based shaders (but except RTP3, I haven’t tested other shaders to see how it looks like. It’s up to you to use shaders that are suitable for a big terrain).
Yes it is handled as several regular meshes with mesh colliders so this is perfectly standard and you can interact with the terrain the same way you do with regular meshes.

To defined the location of mountains you’ll have to parameter generator modules. You can also use heightmap module and give it your own heightmap. You can get a look at the video to learn a bit more about that.

23

Does it work on mobile projects?

24

It could, but honestly for now I have to answer no. I think it will need specific optimizations for mobile devices. Maybe one day I will work on this point, but in the short term I prefer to add more powerful features and fix bugs that people might encounter.

25

Looking forward to your release looks good.

26

Thanks @psistalk
It’s still pending for review. It should be a matter of days.

27

Hi, nice work, especially the view distance. Your demo passes the test of walking for a long time and not having messed up chunks :wink:

Few (hardcore) questions :
1 - What’s the price for the standard dll version ?
2 - Is the engine all implemented in c# or is there native c++ code ?
3 - Will you sell a full source code version - how much ?
4 - Are you using a floating origin system - does the player always stay at 0,0,0 ?
5 - Does it work with a standard FPS kit (unity charactercontroller or UFPS) ?

Thanks !

28

@Razmot
Thanks for your feedback!

1 - Price has been decided by comparing Ultimate Terrains with other voxel engines on the Asset Store. It will be $125.
2 - It is c#. The big advantage is that it is compatible with any platform without any issue. The main disadvantage is the garbage collector but that is my problem. I had to use some tricks and to be very meticulous with memory use but I took care of it. You won’t have to worry about GC.
3 - Maybe in the future, but not for now. If it is the case it will probably be a few thousands dollars, but I didn’t think about that yet.
4 - No, there is no floating origin system. I hesitated but I found that it would be too difficult to use for most of people.
5 - Demos are made with Unity CharacterController. I haven’t tested it with UFPS but there is absolutely no reason why it should not work. Terrain is nothing more than regular meshes.

29

Ultimate Terrains is now available on the Asset Store!

I really hope you will enjoy using it.

I will pay close attention to your feedback and bug reports. If you have any question before buying, please ask it here (on this forum thread). If you have bought uTerrains and have any question or suggestion, you can get support on the website and report bugs here.

In the mean time, just so you know, next update is already in development with new features and bug fixes.

Thank you very much!

30

Just bought it ! No sleep for me for the rest of this week !

1 Like
31

Thank you very much @SecretStudio !
Don’t hesitate to ask if you need some help and let me know if you have any suggestion :wink:

32

Picked it up as well, for a first release it is very solid.
I am using it in Unity 5.
Not tried yet though can I use SpeedTrees grass and trees with this?

33

Thank you very much @AaronClark !
I’m glad you find it solid for a first version.

You can use whatever prefab you want for trees so yes the ones of SpeedTrees should work.
Concerning grass, triangles are generated by uTerrains so you can’t use custom meshes, but you can use your own grass textures of course.

34

Got it!
Works like a charm on my laptop. I agree with @AaronClark this is very solid, especially for a first version.

35

Thanks @Casto_1 !
I’m very glad to get so positive feedbacks :slight_smile:

36

I’m going to buy it too.
Have you already planed something for future updates?

37

Thanks @Bharata !

I prefer to tell only what I’m sure about, so I won’t speak about what will come in the long term, but the next update is going to arrive soon with:

  • bugs fix
  • the ability to choose between properly connected seams (current version) and skirts to handle LOD breaks. Skirts don’t look as good as seams sometimes, but they are 30 to 40% faster to compute.
  • the ability to automatically duplicate vertices to fix texture stretching issues.
  • maybe more…
38

Just bought and imported, getting these two compile errors in Unity 5 (windows):

Assets/uTerrains/UnityEditor/Editor/ChunkEditor.cs(9,21): error CS0101: The namespace global::' already contains a definition for ChunkEditor’

Assets/uTerrains/UnityEditor/Editor/OnRun.cs(4,14): error CS0101: The namespace global::' already contains a definition for OnRun’

39

@Don-Gray
Thank you for purchasing uTerrains!
These errors means you already have a script called “ChunkEditor” and a script called “OnRun” in your project. I think this is just a little compatibility issue with another asset.

I will rename these two scripts in Ultimate Terrains so you won’t have this problem anymore in the next update.
If you want to fix it immediately you can just rename the scripts (and the class inside the scripts) like this:

  • rename: UnityEditor/Editor/ChunkEditor.cs → UnityEditor/Editor/ChunkComponentEditor.cs
[CustomEditor(typeof(ChunkComponent))]
public sealed class ChunkComponentEditor : Editor
  • rename: UnityEditor/Editor/OnRun.cs → UnityEditor/Editor/OnRunUltimateTerrains.cs
[InitializeOnLoad]
public class OnRunUltimateTerrains
{
    static OnRunUltimateTerrains ()
    {

Let me know if it fixes all your problems.

40

You know since unity 4.5 there is no reason to not use namespaces ? And before 4.5 the only problem was that you could not put default valued method parameters in monobehaviours with a namespace - Having a namespace protects you from any script name conflict in case you don’t know :wink: