We want to hear from you about what you need from Unity most to succeed when building large, open world experiences in Unity!
We do our best to manage the public world building roadmap in terms of publicly showcasing what features and technology we are considering and have recently added some cards here. If you have any feedback on the specific features on the World Building roadmap, please do add it there as those cards are tied to features in our backlog and this is the most efficient way to route your feedback to ensure it doesnât get lost. You just need to be logged in with your Unity ID to do so.
If you donât see a specific feature, or want to request something that isnât yet listed, please add this to the âsubmit new ideaâ card. Much of the time your feedback gets added to features in the backlog that just arenât shown publicly.
If you have more specific questions or want to start a dialogue about feature requests, please add to this thread and Iâll do my best to monitor and respond in a timely manner. Iâm also available for direct messages or dialogues through the forum.
Iâm very interested in the rendering one and non-destructive workflows.
Would this tool be only working with layers (which is already great) or will it also work with a graph?
In any case, thank you for sharing this with us, Iâm happy to see improvement in the worldbuilding part of Unity.
Glad to see the roadmap being updated!
Personally, I am unable to use terrain due to bad performance on Android. It has a huge amount of draw calls.
I have to use terrain-to-mesh tools in order to run it properly for standalone VR games, which is a bummer.
@shikhrr , thanks for the comment, and noted. We are definitely considering how unity can provide these types of capabilities.
@jalbastefan828 , thanks for the link and Iâll respond to that thread as well. Being the Product Manager for World Building is a relatively new assignment for me so Iâll be catching up on as much of the threads as I can here. Many of these features are in our backlog for consideration so all of the posts and threads do indeed help us prioritize what we work on and when.
@PaulMDev , layers, not graphs should be expected.
@DevDunk , noted. Android and standalone VR are tough platforms for performance and optimization for sure and we appreciate you using Unity to deploy to them. Reducing draw calls and providing tools and tech to support these platforms is definitely our intent.
@Onigiri , noted. I will add this to our insights for scattering and instancing. Appreciate the feedback!
I would like to see unity solutions for float accuracy on large worlds. Maybe it is the responsibility of another team/system, like the future DOTS streaming system, but currently all monobehaviour solutions have very significant drawbacks, like breaking static batching when moving the whole world, huge impact on physics performance when moving rigid bodies on origin change., etc.
It would also be interesting to improve the tree system and details, as well as object placement on terrain. For example, the fact that trees cannot be normal gameobjects (or be converted when the player approaches) with more components is something that every unity user has asked for at some point.
What would be incredible is that somehow you could decouple terrain authoring from terrain managment. In fact, having an option to bake it into a mesh would save people a lot of time until âterrain managment/optimizationsâ are developed further. Right now, if you donât buy/build that tools to convert the terrain into a mesh, you are tied to unity terrain lod system, unity terrain shaders⌠Which wouldnât be a real problem if they performed well on mobile platforms, but thatâs not the case so most of the time you have to rely on packages like: GitHub - jinsek/MightyTerrainMesh: A Unity Plugin for Converting Terrain 2 Mesh & Terrain 2 Data for Runtime Virtual Texture.
And last, but not least, please take a look at all annoying errors and warnings especially when using the new terrain tools like: Unity Terrain Detail Mesh warning Atlas uncompressed which may have a solution, but there is 0 documentation on those warnings.
@AdrielCodeops , while itâs not the team I represent, Unity does have a team looking at improving our coordinates for large open worlds in addition to a number of other improvements. This is definitely a major problem for many large open real time 3D experiences so itâs something weâd like to address at Unity.
As to the tree and detail systems and object type, thank you for the feedback. This is helpful to see and hear and certainly something weâve seen and heard before as you mention. But all the feedback helps us prioritize.
And the other aspects of terrain performance on mobile and the errors are helpful to hear as well. Thanks for raising them here.
@mgear , we have extensive feedback for ProBuilder over the years and we definitely have it captured and look at it all, but yes, all valid for certain.
Hey Eric, cool to see you over here in world building now and thanks for this post. A couple of questions, does submitting the âHow Important Is this to youâ helpful?
In the âNon-destructiveâ car, there is âA mask based scattering system with occlusion makingâ. Does that mean procedural terrain detail/tree placement? I just donât want to submit another idea if it is already covered by that.
Also, that UI for it in the screenshot looks lovely! (Even if a bit âun-Unityâ. But it is pretty, so I will accept it )
Hey @MechaWolf99 , glad to be here! Yes, that would be a procedural detail and placement system. And glad you like the proposed UI. Weâre definitely looking at how we can make a system that is more accessible and familiar to artists coming from Substance Painter.
Things that Unityâs terrain system lacks (from the most important to the least important):
Performance
The terrain system shouldnât require dozens of GBs of memory to create a world.
A button to delete a terrain GO and the terrain file with one click.
Layer-based system for the terrain creation (layers with heightmaps, splatmaps, and maybe layers with specific modifiers, like a possibility to mask out a part of the terrain that needs water erosion)
Units for stuff like rising the terrain must be independent of the max height setting.
Possibility to add more materials per terrain. An easy way to deal with stuff like biomes.
Possibility to set up which grass, trees, and other assets are supposed to go on a certain material. The expected outcome is that I will paint a âgreenâ texture, and the grass and trees will spawn automatically. With the possibility to select different variants based on some data (like heightmap, maybe some custom texture like the temperature map).
Possibility to set up automatic painting based on the height map (and other custom maps?). I want to instantly see a ârockâ texture on a slope by using only the âRaise or Lower Terrainâ tool.
Possibility to increase/decrease the maximum terrain height without breaking too much.
I donât want to start editing the terrain at the bottom, but in the middle.
Something similar to Unrealâs âprocedural content generationâ.
Possibility to increase the size of the terrain without dealing with technical problems.
Procedural creation of the terrain with some node-based toolkit.
Multi editing of the terrain objects (I think there is a workaround for this in the terrain toolkit package)
Shortcut for hiding the paintbrush (to see whatâs going on with the terrain).
Maybe possibility to develop different types of terrain (3D terrain, sphere terrain, breakable terrain, low-poly terrain, etc.) without needing to recreate the default toolkit.
I was thinking Unity have been ralready working on these roadmap items and they will be ready to release soon. However, as I see roadmaps are just being created. Unity lacks a good terrain system for a long time. When all these will be released? 2025? DissapointingâŚ
I donât think Unity is serious about worldbuilding. It is very important for faster workflows. Unreal is so ahead in this dir. Unity is just stuck with maintaining multiple render pipelines.
As far as I remember, there were attempts to do worldbuilding via DOTS, there is the terrain toolkit, some minor updates to the existing system, and splines. Now they are working on Shadergraph integration. You could also argue that cloud and water systems for the HDRP are related to worldbuilding.
I donât think there is a lack of commitment but rather a typical mess for this company.
Almost all terrain-related tasks are âunder considerationâ suggesting no one is actively working on these features. Possibly they have put on hold some packages due to the current situation at Unity.
All of this should mean that, as of right now, the team is only working on the shader graph integration.
Gosh, I waited for some kind of such topic for a while. We have a lot of decent systems right now, but let me be clear, terrain system and vegetation placement got stuck in Unity 5 at best.
After Using Microsplat and Vegetation Studio for ages, boy there are a LOT of systems that I would like to see some day.
⢠Triplanar UV shader, steep surfaces should be treated well in visual aspect
⢠Splatmaps and Heightmaps names that speak for itself, as well as blending options like Height based
⢠Proper PBR implementation. I think current PBR maps are somewhat lacks in terms of explanation for newbies, and requirements to make mask, I understand that 3rd party tools doing itâs job, but we are speaking about built-in solution, so either make tool that merging maps or make separation for each texture slot
⢠Distance rescaling & Anti-tilling measures, this needs like fresh air, especially for big world where you see pretty far away and grass rendering stops at certain distance
⢠Procedural tool: Iâm not familiar with it, but would be nice to do some kind of rules where you can put textures (angle, steepness etc.) same for vegetation per texture or using 3d mask with certain rule
⢠Terrain blending, ability to blend lower tips of models with terrain is not only crucial feature, but also immersion helper in terms of fidelity
⢠Terrain sewing, this one is not so popular, but certain artists can feel my pain, when you accidentally broke the height between two or more terrains, you canât âsewâ it and you will left with gaps between terrains, technically they are connected, but height will be different.
⢠Tessellation, this thingy, one of the most important, if not the most important. Ability to make tessellation based on height maps or other system needs like fresh air now.
⢠Vegetation placement. Iâll be straightforward, in HDRP itâs just rip and tear, you just cannot place vegetation using built-in system, it doesnât have frustum culling, you cannot set distance for shadows per LOD group, overall system is outdated and should be re-made from ground up using new systems involving DOTS or similar. Instanced indirect (even though itâs not even supported in base Unity, is not enough for this kind of task)
Again, we are speaking about built-in vegetation placement, not prefab or mesh combining and other hacks.
⢠Exact same for detail system & grass placement both are not optimized to use in full-fledged way.
⢠Ability to edit each tree placement manually: when you place trees on steep angles, itâs really needed to edit it manually.
⢠Better system to spray grass across hilly environment (model grass, not sprite one) like Blanket shader or similar
⢠Overall optimizations for terrain, there is a reason why people almost instantly swaping from terrain to model, yes, base terrain eats quite a bit of resources.
Asset Store is full of assets that are more or less fulfilling those points, but having same features in base Unity would be blessing from heavens, no more fiddling with Discord channels, why N thingy is not working and why N thingy has memory leaks.
First off, thank you all for taking the time to provide feedback! This genuinely helps us prioritize our backlog and develop of features so that we can provide the most value in the shortest possible time.
Just know that anything close to a feature request from last week has been logged and treated as such. @useraccount1 and @Jack_Martison , thank you in particular for the detailed lists and prioritized requests. At a high level, I think you both will be very pleased with our current plans if you can be patient enough to wait for their release.
@Misaki_eKU , any procedural system planned will be layer based, not node based, however we do have more of a node based creation workflow in the backlog, just no plans to develop that as of yet. In short, the time and cost of developing a robust node graph based procedural mesh generation tool have not seemed worth the investment when much more complete tools like Gaea, Houdini, and World Machine are much more complete and capable and have been available for a long time now.
We canât commit to a timeline yet for any release of new features, tech, or workflows, but as soon as we have a set timeframe for release we will definitely share more specifics. Our goal is to give much more accurate timeframes for feature and tech releases moving forward to prevent anyone from basing their own timelines and projects on ours without confidence in our release schedules.
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