Hey so I am planning to start messing around with some ideas I have and I decided I wanted to start by getting a terrain started. I want to do something in the style of say rollercoaster tycoon or openttd where the world is built on a grid but there are slopes between elevations. The other feature that is fairly important is the ability to adjust the level of the terrain using some tools.
I have been trying to do some research to determine where to start with this, however, I have been fiding 0 resources with anything that could help. I found an asset on the store which is close to what I want to do but I want to do it myself so I can do some things differently.
If anyone could point me towards some good places to start looking I would appreciate it thanks.
I was looking at something like this for a old 2D Sprite jRPG like game that used 3D with perspective. I would have loved a terrain that works more like the tycoon or 3d version of the tilemap feature in Unity.
Sadly, the closest version of the type of terrain we are talking about is as it seems no longer in development and I beleibe the code is now broken due to changes in the code API.
If you get this working, I would love to see it. Maybe even buy a copy if you put it on the asset store.
I tried to Blender up me a set of chunks to simulate the style in a Occlusion Culling friendly way, but as it sits it takes me hours to assemble a village and it’s landscape this way. And that just ten buildings and a small park.
Thanks. Yeah, I am just trying to work out a way to make it so that I can make it procedural and have it so the player can adjust them in game. At the moment I am considering trying some sort of 3d grid. Then have it so the terrain is made up of a number of points which each have x,y,z coordinates, The X and Z would be fixed while the Y can be toggled. Then having it connect up all these points. The issue will be corner sections which may need an exception programmed in for them. The other issue I have with this idea is that I think it could be pretty messy and struggle performance wise, let alone setting it up for some sort of height map.
Need to find some info on how to create the points and then how to automatically connect them.
You’re on the right track. A dynamic mesh is the correct way to tackle this. Performance will be fine — we’re talking about a relatively low-poly mesh here, and no complicated math.
Thanks. I mean what I mentioned there was mostly just word vomit of what I was thinking at the time. Dynamic mesh sounds a lot more technical so that term might help me work something out thanks. Also thanks for the reassurance about performance. I was hoping it wouldn’t be an issue but wasn’t 100% sure based on the number of vertices that something like this may use.