So, I want to get more in depth into procedurally generated terrain where I can essentially make a complete landmass, with some mountains, valley’s plains, beaches, etc. with a body of water surrounding it. Most terrain generator’s I’ve seen make an entire terrain the same way (ie. all mountainous, or all plains, or beach, or whatever). I want a fully featured continent of sorts, and while I don’t imagine that to be too hard to create once I get into procedural terrain manipulation, I would love to save myself some time in getting to that point, either by being pointed to a program, or essentially a quick guide to a basic overview of how it all works so I can jump right in and learn the more advanced and in depth stuff on my own tweaking things to fit my needs.
Secondly, I’m wondering what the best solution to texturing based on height and slope is. I have yet to look to in depth into this yet so forgive me if there’s a simply solution that everyone knows about readily available. I believe I’ve read about being able to get vertex height, so I’m sure retrieving heights won’t be too much of an issues, but will I have to manually calculate slopes as well?
Thirdly, is there a way to create an underground terrain complete with walls and ceiling? Essentially an enclosed space with the exception of the entrance. I know Unity’s terrain is supposedly just a heightmap so I don’t believe it’s necessarily possible, but in discussions with others who have done procedurally generated terrain they have said they believed it might be possible, so I’m just checking. Furthermore, in the even there isn’t a way to do that (or even if there is for that matter), is there a way to turn off collision and essentially render a piece of terrain invisible? A scenario for this would be if I had to have a level model created to simulate a cave or underground city or something, and I wanted the player to be able to run into it from the above ground world and not have to load a new scene (I’m trying to make the game as seamless as possible).
Finally, I worked on a project a bit back where our tools team found a terrain generator that once a terrain was created on runtime, it persisted into the editor (and sometimes overwrote terrain in other scenes… was rather annoying…), so I was wondering how I would go about automatically saving procedurally generated terrain? I don’t have a need at the moment for dynamically generated terrain on the fly, so simply being able to generate a terrain, save it and use it for a scene would be fine, though I imagine dynamically creating it on the fly might be simpler, but again, not what I need.