Sorry if this has already been discussed to death, but I couldn’t find any threads dedicated to the lack of a terrain engine on the iPhone.
I really miss the terrain engine, and was wondering what substitutes for it others are using. What’s a good (and perferrably free) tool for creating low poly meshes using tools like a brush to help you create organic looking terrains? Any that can import Unity’s heightmaps to bring your current terrains to the iPhone?
And last but not least, does anyone know if we can look forward to the terrain engine eventually becoming iPhone compatible?
I don’t think the iPhone has the horsepower to make the Unity terrain engine feasible. You can use Fractscape (<-shameless plug ) to make low-poly terrains. Draw a heightmap in Photoshop or whatever, or export Unity terrains, or just use randomized parameters, and you can fiddle around with various options to make interesting landscapes, which you can export as .obj files (among other things).
the terrain engine is totally impossible on the iphone which can only handle 2 textures in parallel.
you will have to use meshes with single textures to have even a basic chance for good performance.
think of the iphone as a cut down N64 graphics wise. because thats the quality you will have to target for.
I have played with Fractscape before, but never thought of using it generate objs to import back into Unity. Will have to try that out!
Dreamora;
I honestly don’t understand exactly what “the terrain engine” encompasses, but why couldn’t Unity just create a simplified version of the “terrain engine” that would convert it’s low resolution heightmaps into meshes (with a single texture) at the same time it is optimizing all your other resources while preparing a game for xcode? Brushing worlds into existence inside the editor environment is just so much fun! I don’t have much experience with what can be done on the iPhone yet, but I played a couple Pangea games yesterday that incorporated decent looking terrains…
because you can only have 4000-7000 polygons in total in view at a time.
the terrain engine, even with a 128 view range has already multiple times that …
just using multiple meshes for multiple textures will kill the performance totally on its own without giving you the possibility to use other objects.
For iPhone you will have to realize that you must build your world hellish optimized (for the very purpose to be an iPhone world, forget about porting games from desktop before even thinking about it), that you must use the occlusion system at its best or that even 15FPS might become a target FPS that is not possible to reach in your 3D project.
The iphone GPU compares to something around TNT / TNT2 class GPU so around 1999 / 2000. I doubt most users here were computer gamers back then so they have likely no idea how little the performance is they have (as comparision: a crappy intel GMA900, considered pretty no end, is still a dozen times more powerfull if not even more)
Guess i’ll just experiment a bit and see what kind of framerate I can get! I really appreciate your comments on the subject.
One thing that really surprised me is how slow the actual processing is.
A fairly simple raycast wheel based car script I tested driving around on a flat slab worked great - until the wheels of the car touched the slab and the wheel traction calculations brought the framerate to a crawl… I can see what you mean about thinking twice before porting a desktop application.
Sure thing. Attached is an archive with a 513x513 heightmap (import as bit16, Mac), 512x512 splatmap, 512x512 color map, Fractscape scene file, and a lower-resolution (129x129) .obj file.
And you wonder about the terrain engine… Remember that the terrain engine isn’t just the detail level, it includes the splat maps, the grass painted on, the trees painted on that get automatic billboarding, and on and on. Sure, one path may have been to create a handicapped terrain engine suitable for the iPhone but that was just not the best use of our time and efforts.
Right you are, Ant. It would be cool, however, to have a low-res terrain with dynamic LOD for the iPhone. But I think the hardware is such that terrains have to be so low-res as it is that it may not be an issue.
) to make low-poly terrains. Draw a heightmap in Photoshop or whatever, or export Unity terrains, or just use randomized parameters, and you can fiddle around with various options to make interesting landscapes, which you can export as .obj files (among other things).
Remember that the terrain engine isn’t just the detail level, it includes the splat maps, the grass painted on, the trees painted on that get automatic billboarding, and on and on. Sure, one path may have been to create a handicapped terrain engine suitable for the iPhone but that was just not the best use of our time and efforts.