Question About Terrain

Questions & Answers
1

Basically I’m playing around with an RPG concept and want to make a large playable area. The original heightmap I have is something like 50,000x30,000 pixels (it’s of the Caribbean, which is something like 2 million by 1.5 million meters, give or take. Obviously I do not want to make that big in the game, that would take way too long to walk across, but still fairly large).

Anyway, that’s a really big heightmap so I want to stream terrain segments to make it appear as one continuous world. So what would be the preferable size I should slice the heightmap into for each segment?

2

Hi,

I think there is no correct answer for that, since it will depend on the number of objects in a particular area (if there is a forest area with a lot of trees, rocks etc, it will be relatively bigger than a simple grass land). I’ve read somewhere though that even if you load the whole level as one, the Unity engine makes some optimizations (like converting distant objects as textures on planes etc). I think something like 4K would do for a small level. You can always call LoadLevelAdditively() to add new terrain segments as you suggested.

Clayton