I have read up on opinions for sizes of terrain an what should and should not be use…everyone has their own opinion. However, I am trying to figure out if my terrain is a good size related to my player and how the two interact. If anyone could point me in the right direction for object:terrain scaling and map size, I would greatly appreciate it!
I have a similar question. I’ve got an existing map (cartography map) of a fantasy world that I want to replicate. The full map size is absolutely massive, but I only want a portion of the map. However, even the portion is large and already much larger than the estimated sizes of existing game maps in popular games (if I was to create it to scale). I am wondering the same things as argeunes - are there any tools that could assist in rescaling the map size and any assets that are added to the game? Is there any process that people apply to their games in order to scale the terrain/assets to a more appropriate size?
You’ll want to keep in mind that a unit in Unity is considered a meter in the physics engine. This is important due to… physics reasons that I do not understand. But I do know that making a player 200 units tall is not a good idea simply due to this.
So, first decide the scale of the player. I personally use 2 units, but of course this is up to you. Just remember not to make it too crazy due to the above note.
Then… well, do whatever scaling matches your player, honestly. As in if the player is 2 units tall for example, make the terrain scaling match that so the player feels like they are the correct scale in relation to the terrain. It’s all based on feel, since I don’t think there’s really any “interaction” that happens depending on the scale of the terrain.
Unless you mean resolution?
I believe Unity 2019.1 has a Terrain Tools package that could possibly help you.
Thanks josh. I think a combination of both of your answers has helped.
So if I look at something like Wow (estimated 80 sq miles of play area pre BC) and try to translate that to a map that is in the 100s of thousands square miles, I think it’s difficult to cram that sort of area and detail into a more manageable and playable area (similar to wow or other games of the genre) from scratch. If we were to use the same unit measurement for the character as you do josh, that would make the character approx. 2 meters tall. So that is a somewhat realistic real world size so you would expect the terrain and the assets to align with reality in order for it to be believable.
My initial thought was that you create the world to scale - using the unity scale of 1 meter (within reason of course). And then once it is created to scale, resize the whole thing down to a much smaller scale. This would mean the character would be much smaller than 2 units. The problem that you aren’t resolving by doing this is that you still have an unfathomably huge world - a world that would actually take huge amounts of time to run across. You’d have to increase the size of the character in order to be able to get across from one side to the other in an acceptable time. Once you do that you then lose some of the realism and scaling.
Looking at programs like Gaia to auto generate terrain, some of the examples they demo are using a 16x16 mile tile. That’s 256 sq miles. The results look great, but when translating that to the world of Warcraft example, you don’t seem to be getting as much variable world space in an area that is 3x larger.
I haven’t really tried to build anything as yet (just playing around with the tools and learning how they work etc), so I might just be over-thinking this. But I am struggling to see how I’ll translate the map into the unity terrain without making it overly huge.
I had thought of maybe trying to lay down some tiles and then overlay the map onto the tiles to allow me to use that as a guide for building the terrain. Again though, it depends on how big those tiles are and what the general size will be in the end. I guess it’s just something I need to get some practice on. It might come to me the more I play around with it.