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

Below I direct you to some of the information you may need to run your scenes in TerraLand.

In TL3, it is possible to select any place in the world and start exploring around in runtime. The sample scenes for streaming take a starting point and loads surrounding terrains at the level start and keeps them updating as the player travels around, so you can customize the codes to change the starting location at any time in the runtime. But please read through the given information at the end of this email to get familiar with the streaming system in TL.

As you continue reading further on Streaming in TL, you’ll find that you can also create your own server out of your pre-downloaded terrain data tiles and let TL connect to this custom local/online cached server without the need of server queries to ESRI or even without need of internet connection if its path is local.

Runtime Streaming of terrain data in TerraLand comes in 2 modes, Online and Offline Streaming.

In Online mode, you set a starting point on Earth and when you go to play mode, all surrounding terrains will be generated around player on-demand acquiring data from ESRI servers using internet.

When you are in Offline mode, you select a big region (can be a country-sized area) and start capturing data tiles for the area so that you can stream in runtime from this cached server without needing internet connection on your hard drive or local/remote server location. In offline mode where you already captured data tiles, you can select starting point in the area at level start but you can implement to query this operation at any time during runtime; read through this post to get started:
TerraLand 3 - Streaming Huge Real-World & Custom Terrains For Open-World Environments page-7#post-4433686

TerraLand comes with plenty of demo scenes to get you started in any of the available world creation modes.

TerraLand is flexible through its various settings to setup proper resolutions and parameters based on user’s target platform so you can define all the settings for yourself and gain practical performance. For large worlds in a streaming environment take a look at the following video where we have background mountains in the scene to hide new terrain popping:

TerraLand 3 - Streaming Huge Real-World & Custom Terrains For Open-World Environments page-2#post-3568995

Online streaming terrains using internet connection in real-time to feed data:

Offline streaming terrains out of cached servers generated by TerraLand Downloader:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmwMbIuFq5U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67QVGLkwmyY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXFjf9MQkvM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_Xltnzl6Ow

The Downloader component in TerraLand has built-in support for ESRI’s world elevation & imagery data. TerraLand also contains various processors and components to generate terrains out of your own custom high-resolution elevation or imagery data files as the only solution for this kind of purpose in gaming engines.

TerraLand 3 has also support for streaming terrains out of unlimited data in your custom local/online servers. Please read the following to get a more technical overview of TerraLand’s capabilities along with showcase & tutorial videos on our YouTube channel.

Regarding own custom Elevation & Imagery data files for terrain generation, read below information:

The power of TerraLand lies within the fact of flexibility and customization, so what you need is definitely doable in despite of lack of support for such implementations in any other assets out there. It can load custom elevation/imagery data files and generate terrains out of them and split them into tiles. Also, the maximum resolution allowed in TerraLand is 8192 so you can go beyond the 4k res in heightmaps, but higher resolutions than 4k may become impractical for real-time usage. There is a built-in solution for custom elevation/imagery terrain manipulation in TerraLand. TerraLand contains a component called “TerraLand Terrain” which takes users’ custom data files and creates terrain(s) out of them.

Take a look at the following links to get started:
TerraLand 2 – High Quality Photo-Realistic Terrains from Real-World GIS Data page-2#post-2599837
TerraLand 2 – High Quality Photo-Realistic Terrains from Real-World GIS Data page-3#post-2700657
TerraLand 2 – High Quality Photo-Realistic Terrains from Real-World GIS Data page-5#post-2971528
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5zfio-42ZM

More on this: TerraLand Terrain loads any available elevation data in 3 formats of Arc ASCII Grid (asc), RAW (.raw) & TIFF (.tif) whether downloaded by TerraLand or not and apply it to new or existing terrains regardless of the resolution of the data itself or terrain resolution(s) and also regardless of terrains count. The data loader is flexible in any forms of resolution and size and re-samples data to any given condition and properly generate terrains from the inserted elevation data. Even if your own custom GIS data is not available in the 3 above-mentioned formats, you can use external GIS software such as Global Mapper to edit and convert the data to desired usable format and export it to any resolution to finally load it into TerraLand Terrain in Unity and generate terrain(s) from it.

[The Moon tutorial]( TerraLand 2 – High Quality Photo-Realistic Terrains from Real-World GIS Data page-3#post-2682805) here uses Photoshop to load large Jpeg 2000 (.jp2) elevation data, crop desired area, and resolution and finally convert it to RAW (.raw) format to be usable in TerraLand Terrain in Unity in order to generate terrain(s) out of it.

Dynamic Scenes TerraLand already comes with Online Streaming terrains to generate environments in runtime

TerraLand 2 – High Quality Photo-Realistic Terrains from Real-World GIS Data page-5#post-2864110

And the Offline Streaming feature in TerraLand 3:

TerraLand 2 – High Quality Photo-Realistic Terrains from Real-World GIS Data page-8#post-3295192
TerraLand 2 – High Quality Photo-Realistic Terrains from Real-World GIS Data page-8#post-3339237
TerraLand 2 – High Quality Photo-Realistic Terrains from Real-World GIS Data page-8#post-3361187
TerraLand 2 – High Quality Photo-Realistic Terrains from Real-World GIS Data page-8#post-3383823
TerraLand 2 – High Quality Photo-Realistic Terrains from Real-World GIS Data page-8#post-3388627
TerraLand 2 – High Quality Photo-Realistic Terrains from Real-World GIS Data page-8#post-3396451
TerraLand 2 – High Quality Photo-Realistic Terrains from Real-World GIS Data page-9#post-3414593

Refer to the following links to get started about TerraLand:

TerraLand 3 Official Discussion Thread:

TerraLand 2 Official Discussion Thread:

TerraLand Tournament Official Discussion Thread:

TerraLand product page:

TerraLand Tournament page:
http://terraunity.com/terraland-tournament/

TerraLand Feature Request:
http://terraunity.com/terraland/