Hello , Ive been working on a project and doing allot of research and allot of planning/documenting so i can have a good well made game .
English is not my main language so sorry for any grammar mistakes
My problem is with the terrain of my game , basically its a huge map and its divided to areas and cities and if i go to unity and create a terrain and make this size lets say 10,000 etc and start making my map its gonna be very hard because iāam looking at a 10k size land . I looked at allot of postās and they said that you can make the play control his view distance and thats not a problem but the problem is making the map . As a designer i cant really work on such huge land , so i was thinking if there is anyway i can divide my terrain into something and work on them separately and then connect them all by letting the player once cross the border he goes to a loading screen and he unloads the other terrain and loads in the new one to reduce lag also .
The game iāam working on is a low poly kinda game its like a cartoon (ish) game and it looks like (Free Realms )
ill post a picture of an example from another game to what iāam trying to make !
basically this picture i posted is the map of a game and if you click on some spots you can teleport to the place but also you can walk to that area ! my question is when they created this terrain that is this huge ,How do they split everything and then put them all together ! because the player can just walk from one area to another and he can look at the other terrain from his position , as if they are all one big terrain
Ah okay, well itās possible that they stitch them together and maybe load/unload ones as the player moves.
I do not really know the answer to that, but I have seen people talking about stitching terrains, and I do know you can load/unload parts as you go.
Originally, I thought you were wanting to split them into parts and do loading scenes, which is possible, too.
Pretty sure itās referred to by that name, as Iāve read posts (only out of curiousity or because they were active somewhere I was reading).
Sorry, if there are other terms for it, I donāt know.
Stitch terrain / combine terrainā¦ Iām sure you will find some results
Seamless worlds? You can do this in Unity. If you want a head start, look at something like World Streamer or Sectr on the asset store. In these cases you make the entire world and then use the tool to split into tiles that stream as the player walks around.
Another idea is to make your scenes and then use a tool to stitch them together. You can find these on the asset store as well.
My problem is not the performance , my problem is when creating the terrain if you look at the picture i posted you can see cities and forests and biomes , my question is can I make them seperatly and then combine all and make the map all together where players can walk from one scene to another with a loading screen !
If you want a loading screen, you just add a collider as a wall/barrier and click trigger, which makes it not collide but triggers a function. That function will load a new scene and your character will be in that new scene. You will have to make your loading screen with a bar or whatever to show the player they are loading.
So, I feel like your instinct is a good one - ādivide and conquerā.
I hesitate to bring up really massive AAA games like Skyrim, but you can see that they took a similar approach. If you adventure around The Rift, versus the areas around Solitude, youāll notice some huge differences. Ditto for Whiterun versus Falkreath. The list goes on.
The general idea Iāve gone with in the past, is to take a smaller region and theme it, but also have in mind a bigger theme. Going back to Skyrim, the theme is clearly āFrozen Ancient Viking Hellhole with a chance of Dragonsā. Even in The Rift - easily the most warm, inviting part of Skyrim - thereās still the ancient tombs and rugged landscape and architecture (also spiders ).
So, do that. You may have a high-level theme. Now, figure out some smaller-scale themes, and have the high-level theme filter through those. Then, design each area at a time, and realize it to learn lessons about how to go about doing the next one, and to discover new possibilities.
Thanks Allot for this , i have been working so hard on the theme and on how ill be dividing my huge terrain and then working on them individually and then stitching them back up using Photoshop
Youāve probably stumbled across this already, but I think the common reference to this approach of dividing up large terrain areas into smaller pieces is āchunksā. A google search of āseamless chunk terrainā certainly comes up with a lot of appropriate hits for this subject.
Thatās for performance ! Today I started making my terrain but itās so hard to make the borders between cities and then making each one by zooming in so much since itās around 15000x7500
I was wondering do u have any tips on making the mountains look kinda realistic or letās say something like this
It is true that chunking greatly helps performance. However, chunking can also be a useful tool in level design. Itās a subdivision, and subdivision makes developing and presenting the educational aspect of a game more manageable.
Way back in an old project of mine - a now-unplayable game called The Heroās Journey - I built everything with 3D tiles. Chunking helped with performance. However, as the game progressed, my dungeons tended to get longer. My first Evil Castle was fairly short, and so was done in a single āchunkā. Later dungeons were broken up into multiple chunks, each with their own gimmick. What I found, was that by designing to chunks or groups of chunks, I could reliably introduce new mechanics to players, and give them a chance to master them.
If you feel like looking into this - and dusting off an old IE browser - after you beat the first Evil Castle, you get sent to a lake town with a crypt under it. This crypt is where I first applied the chunking idea; the first part is a standard side-to-side crawl where you have to jump to avoid a monster who fires projectiles. The second chunk goes vertical - you have to fall, while possibly avoiding these same monsters. The next chunk has two Steelguards - monsters who swordfight like the player - to de-escalate the challenge back to something familiar; you only fight one depending on how you fell down. The final chunk, is all story, and advances the main questline.
At a high level, the mechanical purpose of the crypt is to introduce the Teleghasts to the player - I let the player know that A) they teleport, and B) they fire projectiles. I let the player experience the kind of damage they can do, but their vulnerabilites - they can only fire straight ahead of them, not at angles or vertically. The player will probably not defeat one of these, as they lack an item that lets them parry Blue Magic. At a low level, each āchunkā is educating the player about an aspect of this new, dangerous mook, until we want to consider the lesson learned - in which case I start diminishing the challenge, before handing the player off to the next step in their quest.
The point of this is to say not to dismiss any aspect of your game as ājust technicalā - in fact, technical aspects of your game can provide opportunities to do a better job of designing your game, and can offer you greater clarity about how to achieve your design goals.
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