Hello, everyone! I am attempting to make an RPG. I am original, as maybe you have noted. At any rate, I am having a theoretical/design issue with my terrains.
Firstly is scale. I wish to do a simple game, not too large. As such, I want to keep my “levels” relatively small, since this is primarily a learning exercise in both game design and Unity proper. The screenshot below was taken on a terrain of 100x100 dimensions. Under what circumstances would that be considered “too small?”
The main meat and potatoes of my question, however, deal with terrain boundaries. I have Googled my heart out and have come up with little. I am familiar with and can (noobishly) implement the common “natural” barries (treelines, big rocks, mountains, raging rivers, etc). However, I am looking for something simpler in these smaller levels I’m making. The reason is I wish to have the “action” occur in my small levels, and then the player can transition to a Zelda/Mario-like overland map and find another level (if this is bad/good/difficult, feel free to let me know). That overland map will essentially be my largest terrain, since it is effectively “the world.” One thing at a time however.
So, here’s the current setup:
As you can see above, there is that common yet ugly “hole” in my terrain. Gaps like this are all over, and are a naturally inevitable part of the process. As I’ve said, I know the normal ways to deal with this (see the mountain to the left). However, I want to implement something a bit subtler (yes, “subtler” is correct, I checked.).
Specifically, I’ve been trying to find a way to do this:
The above is a screenshot I found on the forums for a game called Shroud of the Avatar (made in Unity). You can see the forest is surrounded by what appear to be 2D images and/or billboards of trees. Within the confines of those 2D images is a whole forest level that looks like the screenshot below:
Does anyone know or can theorize about how those 2D images were made/imported/billboarded? I have attempted to set a texture on a quad and lock a camera to it via GUI, but that didn’t work so well. Also, you’ll note the 2D textures have the unique shape of a treeline, whereas anything on a quad will be a rectangle/square shape.
Finally, does anyone know the PROPER name for these things? I wonder if I couldn’t find what I was looking for becuase I was using the wrong terminology for whatever the heck those things are called. I use a lot of variations on “boundaries” and “horizons” and “level size delimitation” and so on.
