Hi All,
Now that Unity 3.4 supports terrain for Android devices, from your experience what is the optimal settings for Android devices for the terrain settings i.e. all the options from the set resolution menue (heightmap resolution, detail resolution, texture resolution etc)?
Thank u in advance
Problem is that its broken and even if you just put nothing on the terrain and its flat it will take 10+ seconds more load time and it will eat about 30MB ram. put things on it and make it bigger it will eat up more.
also thing dont work right, its buggy.
I have a high end phone and a simple scene takes about 12+ seconds to load.
The terrain is suited for iPad2 class devices and those only
For anything else I would heavily recommend to invest in Terrain 4 Mobile
Thank u for your answers
So I don’t understand why it is written that on high end device it works…Did anyone test it on Galaxy S 2? or Android Tablet? I think tablets and SG2 should have enough power to tun the terrain…
What do u think?
Well i do have a Galaxy s and that one is faster then a stock SG2. its very tweaked and if it dont wokr on that then it dont work on any android phone.
So why the lie it does work on a high end phone when its very clear it dont.
Like i did say its not problem after you loaded the terrain, but it take to much time and alot of memory.
Also some stuff like grass is broken.
Thank u very much for your answers
O.K then the terrain editor is out of the question I guess…
It takes a fair amount of time to load. Though significantly more on android than iOS cause iOS has only inbuilt flash and loads from there extremely fast, a thing that the SD card offload on android can not claim to offer even remotely and if you bomb it with several dozen mb of data to load at worst (heightmap, splat map, the tiled textures, lightmap at worst, + all foliage, detail object and grass painted on it and their distribution maps) it just will take its time.
Its not a holy grail, a single unity terain can easily be heavier on data than whole MW2 levels (MW2 on android to be clear here), so don’t expect your terrain to load faster than MW2 loads its levels as their optimization >> yours for near granted.
we still talk about mobile dev as much power as they might have, so optimize stuff for your needs instead of “for simplicity” as mobile devices are rather unforgiving to shortcuts
Terrain4Mobile kills unity on that end cause it loads 5 textures at max normally, thats the splat map + whatever you tile. The terrain etc are no maps, the terrain is a detail limited mesh (the unity terrain generates the stuff and switches lod), the foliage etc are placed prefabs you can’t update automatically anymore after placing as unity no longer applies mesh import settings updates to existing prefabs and instances since the change in 3.3
PS: do I like this - no. But I waredn people already on 3.0 that their dream of the terrains being super performant and light on mobiles will not come true anytime soon (and as long as you want wind and tree lod will not come true till 2013) and that they better look for a lightweight solution which Stephane with T4M provides at very low cost for example if they want performant terrains on mobiles. Or handtailored, opted meshes + occlusion culling
Well some stuff do work, but you must ask yourself what you need.
If you only want a terrain then you can do it in other way and import it like fbx and add all trees and stuff you want. its both faster to load and take less memory.
But you do loose some stuff.
I did test this very much and with the same scene without terrain it loaded up in seconds and used about 28MB.
With the same scene but added a basic terrain with nothing on it accept 1 texture the scene did take over 12 seconds to load up and it did take about 60MB.
If i did add stuff on the terrain, like hills and more textures it did not changed the startup or the memory usage.
Dreamore say that I should buy the mobile terrain system instead. well if that work then the STOCK system should work as good.
I hope this will be fixed soon for its stupid if I must pay for an other system for the stock system dont work…
A terrain even if empty is already 2 textures at minimum (potentially even 4): Heightmap (as terrains are stored as heightmap, not mesh and its generated from that upon load → this takes the major amount of time to generate the terrain, the rest of the bomb is the terrain collider which even on a core i7 on desktop takes a fair amount of time), SplatMap0 and the other 2 under potentially are the Tree distribution map and the Detail object distribution map (unsure if they are generated if not required).
The size of each of those textures is basically under your control through the Terrain SetResolution. you can get quite up on the performance if you opt it, but the degeneration of quality and the fact that it even then takes more to do what T4M does disqualified it for me. And the fact that Unity terrain engine instantiated trees ignore all components on the trees automatically excluded it as option at all as you can’t add footprints to the trees for SimplePath which we use and need.
But its not a performance problem when you have loaded the system(scene)
Its how long time it does take to load.
In my phone i do have 6MB/sek+ So it should take about 1-2 sek to load the whole app.
Like i did say its not what you put on the terrain that is the problem, its the system thats the problem.
I can make a complex scene with alot of shaders with 3-4 textures on every object and still its alot faster to load up then an empty scene with a terrain.
Like i did say my Galaxy s is fast, about twice as fast then a stock galaxy s, some times even faster.
So if I can get speed with loading this terrain then there is no phone that can…
So if they do a system for mobile it should work on high end phone and it dont.
So its broken and just bad…
Thank u guys for your answers.
I want small terrain with few trees (including colliders of course) and some grass and rocks. Not massive but only here and there
I guess I’’ use Blender to model the terrain and trees. I’m not sure what to do with the grass. If that won’t work the way I want I’ll check out the Terrain4Mobile but it really sucks because I’ve spent a lot of money on Unity…
Thank u
It dont explain why a simple scene take same time that if you do alot on the terrain.
Its one thing if it take longer time to load when you have lot of hills and trees and that kind in the terrain.
I would understand that, but it dont change much if you mak the terrain big or small, att hills or not, add trees and other stuff or not.
Maybe they can get it fixed somehow, but right now the only way to use it to add a scen before you load it up and tell people to wait for its loading.
Also the grass dont work and i bet there is more thats broken in it.
Well try it out first, but the grass dont work. it can be a bug in unity 3d to.
It seems to me that 3.4 is still a beta with all bugs and errors people do have with it.
So it might get fixed. I also has spent alot of money on unity and I have waited for this terrain and now when we got it then its not usable.
So i got 3 choice.
use it and do things around it so it dont look that bad for the user.
Buy the terrain4mobil and hope its works better.
Dont use terrain at all…
Fast does not help. Terrain colliders are very calculation intense, generating the geomipmap terrains out of the heightmap is so too and spreading - instantiating stuff on the terrain basing on the distribution maps is so too.
Yoru comparision with normal mesh models fails unless you stick 50 different each with 256x256 uncompressed textures in, in front of the camera at scene start, which I highly doubt you do, for obvious reasons.
And the Galaxy S is not high end, it was in 2009 at least if you excluded the LG Optimus, but thats where its “fast” ends.
Its not slow compared to other android devices yeah, but by any stretch of what the terrain system is for, its a funny joke. The terrain system is targeted at desktop systems and even with the 3.4 mobile one still shows that just too well (otherwise the detail - gras - tree painting would have been cut as it kills a significant amount of performance kill even with no tree in sight)
And the fact that android lacks the optimization that iOS has for this kind of tasks does not really help the Galaxy S etc either, thats why android suffers even more than iOS. Go out, hate your device maker or face it. Want a fast android device in the sense of optimization, then there is one and only one device at the time, thats the Xperia Play. anything else isn’t opted for gaming but for general usage, media and fluent interaction and thats not gonna changing as the need to update to new Android versions and manually upgrade it for each device eats all the dev time the device makers ahve or want to invest. Thats why HTC and Samsung also send out new OS versions with drivers that are known to be bad.
I personally would have favored if the terrain wasn’t brought to mobile, as its just too obvious that at least 95% of all users will get seriously angry as it being there builds the expetations that you can bring over ANYTHING from the desktop or webbuild and if there is one thing you will not be able to do, then its exactly that.
You can use it if you create the terrain only and targeted at the mobile and keep the stuff going on physics wise to a minimum, otherwise all you do is invite an FPS kill fest with serious loading times
Well first of all galaxy s is high end and i dont know what you will compare it with that is better.
Sure sgs2 is now a better phone, but say galaxy s is not high end is just to funny.
Also its from 2010…
Also stop talking about this phone when you really dont know much about it.
I have read all over the place you do write about it and you is wrong on every point.
Also the fact is that Unity3d did release terrain for mobile and it should work just fine on this phone.
You dont seem to understand that its not the speed IN the game thats the problem. its the loading time.
Do you understand the different???
what i do is to create a terrain as commonly you do (Standalone), but in Android Platform… considering this:
Anyway, my game view is top… like an old snes RPG, but at least i have good results on Devices…