TerraLand 3 - Streaming Huge Real-World & Custom Terrains For Open-World Environments

The best bet to get started about streaming in TL is to experiment with the provided sample scenes in the package, there are 3 separate sample scenes for offline streaming in TerraLand.

Also make sure to watch closely the provided video tutorials on our YouTube channel.

For generating a cached streaming server from own custom data files in TerraLand, watch this tutorial here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67QVGLkwmyY

which generates streaming terrains out of World Machine’s heightmap and splatmap renders in runtime.

Some general information regarding the streaming system in TerraLand:

The current streaming system in TL is pretty naive and firstly it was meant to act as a cache GIS server such as all mapping servers out there. It does a good job at this right now and you can put gigabytes or more heightmap/imagery data in those servers and TL can load them and stream them at runtime and generate terrain tiles from scratch dynamically even though they were never imported into Unity at all which is the system’s greatest advantage.

The system access server path through a simple .Net IO function which can take either a local or an online path. The structure of a working server is explained here: https://discussions.unity.com/t/611457 page-8#post-3388627

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXFjf9MQkvM

But for open world games and multiplayer genre everything gets 100 times more complex and all assets need to be packed on a server to finally be streamed in runtime in a more managed way. That’s why we are thinking of a multi-purpose solution with different techniques to stream whatever assets on demand just as assetbundles in Unity but without needing to import or pre-build those assets if possible. This won’t happen soon though.