Terrain data feature request

Unity Engine
1

While this is an issue with terrain data generally, it’s trees where it becomes a real issue, because trees are the one case where you realistically need to have unique instance id’s.

And that’s the request, add some type of unique id like a Guid to TreeInstance.

Position doesn’t work because of floating point accuracy. The position you set when you add a tree instance, often won’t be the same when you grab the tree instance at a later time.

So it’s basically impossible to have a unique id for a tree that exists over different play sessions. Using the tree index only works in limited scenarios.

This would be a very simple feature addition that would make life far easier for those of us doing runtime tree manipulation.

2

FYI the best approach I found is never, or only fairly rarely actually remove trees. Just set the scale to 0. This allows you to use the tree index as a unique id. Then periodically check to see if the number of ‘removed’ trees is too high and clean it up. Which in the context of a multiplayer game is a pain, but it’s less pain then any other approach I’ve been able to come up with.