24 Hour Terrain Demo

Managed to fry my daughters 8800 GTX Ultra. It was probably about to die anyways, it was getting long in the teeth.

 

My GTX 570m had no issues. I am currently working in project anarchy , but this would be a perfect asset for when my Omni comes and I come back to Unity to finish my VR-ED Rift enabled project.

 

I am now officially an egg hunter. I spent about an hour and a half scouring the terrain for this Easter egg. I feel like I hunting for a picture of Big Foot.

The only thing weird I would was the terrain texture in the screenshot. It kinda looks like a face . . . it might just be wishful thinking.

Note: I had to re-size some of my images from 1920x1080 to 1280x720.



This is a enlarged version of the face.


Enough speculation, now for the pretty photos.
This was the first shot I took.


I love the grass in this demo.


More photos to come!

 

A simple tree.


Soooo much flare.


This post wouldn't be complete without an overly dramatic picture of the summit.


I am looking forward to the updates coming up on the demo! Great job on the asset!

BloodHound92

 

I would just like to point out, that it’s nice to hear that some of you with your GTX570’s and 580’s are saying you had no issues. Well Of course I didn’t fry my GTX580. It just got quite naturally hot after 3 hours of non-stop speeding through lots of grass, trees, snow and mountains. The fan on the card automatically pushed up its speed to a more definite and noticeable Decibel level. I just counteracted with my 4 big internal fans so that I wouldn’t fry the card and could keep on for another few hours.
And yes! I do feel slightly addicted to finding this Easter egg. I don’t really know why but it has given me a lot of new ideas for a few games.
It would be great to see how this looks in the Oculus Rift and being able to fly from one mountain to the other in the rift would be great. I think flying around this world would be fun as it is really, really, really is much bigger than you think. I mean 900qm² KM is a lot. Just think about the country your living in and how big or small that is. If someone said to me, “I’ve hidden an Easter egg for you somewhere in Germany, just go and find it!” I would say get on your bike and look for it yourself. But here it is different. We can cover greater distances without even leaving the swivel chair. And soon maybe we will fly or even Base-jump or paraglide to the next mountain. Who knows?

 

I spent again two hours looking for this tiny little thing...
I didn't find the egg, but I was at the sea, in the mountains and in the woods... What a great day

 

Wouaw ! Impressive ! This terrain can be nice to create a kind
Of hunting game or/and sandbox to build structures with friends.
How many terrain are used in this project?

 

It definitely is impressive. But finding the easter egg is impossible

 

True. Another idea: include a multiplayer to see others discovers walking in the set

 

14 hours still nothing

 

A little idea.

You and 2 Teams arrive on this very big Island with a very a big customized battleship. For the expedition is everything you could possibly need. Boats, plains, choppers, diggers, cranes, GPS, satellite phones, cages, tents, mobile rooms, automatic transport drones and the list goes on. Practically everything you would need that could all fit into a battleship. To keep things consistent, the two teams or more, red and blue have joined the game and acquire the objectives to find and retrieve certain objects. There are clues which a team that work well together will be able to follow and solve; maybe a little googling will be necessary for certain puzzles. Of course the quicker you solve problems the quicker you get to the first search point. Yes, search point because once at a location you still are not quite sure where to find the clue zone. Everyone has a micro light aircraft to get around and do Arial and near ground searches. It could be that one objective would be to find the mountain base that is surrounded by red poppy flowers. The first from the team could then land and radio over the coordinates for their fellow team members. Once at the site other equipment can be radioed in and airdropped from drones that are located at their base on the ship. The drones can fly over the received coordinates and drop requested equipment like jeeps, motorbikes and depending on the situation maybe even boats and jet skis. Maybe you even need a digger or explosives or a hovercraft. This could all be supplied by the drones.
Object of the game is to find and recover certain object and return to base before the other team or teams. Each team would have different locations, so that no team gets in the way of the other. During the game your team will receive constant updates on how the other teams are progressing. It could also be added to this game, maybe some creatures that you have to fight off, difficult rapids or paths to cross. Flairs could be used to notify others if you get lost. Other teams could spy and maybe try and sabotage your site.
I think there could be a lot that could be done here. It would of course have to be better thought out than just my rambling.

What do you guys think? Any Idea’s to add or destroy?

 

Yeah, this would be nice for many other varieties of games, too, but I'm thinking open world exploration. It would be cool if, somehow, we could see the scene in different seasons; i.e use a shader to put some snow on the ground and in the trees. That would be awesome.

You know, someone could take this, along with some dynamic sky solution in the Asset Store, and make a really awesome Unity tech demo. Just a thought.

I have no idea how many terrains are being used... I know the area is 900 km[SUP]2 [/SUP]but I doubt personally it's 900 individual terrains... maybe each terrain is 2 - 4 km[SUP]2[/SUP]?

EDIT: Something I've been wondering... are the trees and ground textures from an Asset Store pack as well? It would seem to make since, considering most of the tech is on there.

 

Nathaniel … WAKE UP !!!!!
It's time for the Mac demo

We are eagerly awaiting

Thank You for a great little treat

 

Its 4 terrains of each 15x15km for those who asked

We are just finishing the last bits bringing some nice improvements on vegetation, dynamic sound, graphic otions, imagefx, mouse sensitivity when zoomed, some info about your walked distance and your current altitude. Some other minor tweaks.
New little features to help on the search are, a map and your position will be saved over to the next session.

Mac and 32bit windows build will be up soon.

We will already give away prizes for 2 great screenshots!
...since some of you guys made really nice screenshots and also searched a lot!!

If you are a winner will be announced when the updated builds are online, you are free to chose the asset you need or want!!

We'll also start the competition over then, so the the quest for the best screenshots continues!!

Again, for those who think it will be impossible to find the egg(the big prize) you might wait for coming updates when more helping things are added
Make some nice screenshots in the meantime and maybe you'll run into the egg by accident!

 

Great! Can't wait, but i still hope to find it

 

The mountain is so small from the far side of the map it's almost invisible...

 

Hey Chad,

Yes the Mac demo will be there within 2 hours .

Nathaniel

 

New Screenshot Still hunting for the easter egg ^^

 

Thx
I want to try and find this Easter Egg also

I think it may take a LOONNGGGG time
HAHA

 

The name puppetmaster reminds me on one nice Lightwave 3D (version 5,6) plugins for animations i used long time ago
Hoping for a good price for the first version as some kind of beta user like i.e. the 50% playmaker until final version offer.

 

If you walk backward without moving the mouse, just pressing Shift and arrow down for 6Minutes you will fall off the planet. So stop just before and walk the edge.

 

Any news on update? ;-)

 

It looks nice but doesn't seem to perform too good.
Running a radeon 7970 (on par with gtx 680) i7 3770k 16gig ram ssd.
Only getting 20-30 fps and drops in the teens in many areas.
(set on fantastic quality mode, setting it on good only gets me 5-10 more fps)

Edit- setting the tree distance lower will gain fps (but I wish I could have thousands of billboards in view like dayZ)
I'm not sure if its the shadows just being enabled effecting performance, as the shadow distance is set very low already.

After playing the new dayZ standalone I was very impressed with how big the environment is and how many trees /billboards / grass / is in view AND the shadow distance AND everything going on in the game with such good performance.
As I see this demo I realize there must be something more going on in that engine that unity doesnt have, even with all of these wonderful assets our performance is still unacceptable with this quality / tree billboard distance wish I knew why

 

I think Nathaniel must be verytired. I know, I would be.

Anybody know why my uploaded pics are not showing here? It did in the first post, but not anymore. In my profile they are attachments. Do you see attachment in my posts, I don’t see nothing just the post.

I ll try anther one ow.
I clck hereon pload imae dselect it fro my driv. then press uploa.

 

Dunno what happened to Nathaniel
He said will upload new version in 2 hours and that was a while ago
I know it is very late for him now
Maybe tomorrow … ?

I am kinda disappointed, but I understand that they have worked very hard and may need some rest

 

When I set the tree distance slider down less then half I get 40+ fps
So the billboarded trees all the way in the far distance is a killer (I wish it wasnt)
But I also wish I could get 100+ fps with a scene like this, because I have a ton of other stuff going on in my game that will bring performance down too.

My problem is I need a ton of billboards in view like dayZ has but its alot harder on unity for some reason.
Is there not a way to get much better performance from billboards? When you think about somehow merging them all into 1 object or mega cutout texture or something, there must be a way!

 

There is nothing unacceptable with Unity's performance. Yes, there are areas that can be improved, but if it were truly unacceptable you wouldn't be here.

There are many optimization so that the developers of this example should include, and some of them have been discussed already. For example, enabling occlusion culling (if it isn't already, I haven't tried it yet because I'm waiting for the Mac release) will help performance as opposed to constraining rendering to the camera's render distance. The game should turn the various terrain objects off and on as you walk around and even stream the content from disk as needed. These would require some code, and Unity Pro, but would probably pay off.

Also, the Day-Z is using a pre-built terrain that's largely already optimized. This example is using assets that were totally custom built by those making this demo.

 

Regarding terrain size: wouldn't more terrains of a smaller size be more efficient? That way you could turn the pieces on/off as needed for optimization.

Can't wait for the new features. Hope this won't crash my computer; I want to find that egg!

 

Be ready looking for hours Haven't found it yet and still looking after 17 hours

 

I looked for a good 25 minutes, worst part is, at the end, I realized I was just going in circles, damn,
http://imgur.com/a/2GVfy#0
I think I forgot to take screenshots for the majority of the time, I was too busy looking at the view, because wow, it is absolutely stunning, and the music is a nice touch too.

I'm 99% sure its somewhere on that snowy mountain, maybe? PLEASE GIVE US A HINT.

I will never stop trying,

 

I looked all over the snow area can't be there but i probably missed some places

 

Yes, we are maybe all just missing it. I have most probably been past more than once. 30 Kilometers X 30 is a lot of walking distance and a hell of a lot to miss. It is either right in front of your nose when you start or stuck up somewhere in a mountain that looks like Mount Rainier National Park.

I think it’s in the mountains and I not going to wear down my boots anymore and wait to get a chopper or Jeep.

 

Maybe it's not even there. Think about it, the map is so big it could be nowhere and we'd never know. This could be an early April 1 joke. :twisted:

 

Must be nice to be able to play it

HAHAHA

I'll continue to wait … Patiently
Maybe when I wake up

 

It’s most certainly there. No joke. Nathaniel has a product to sell and promote and to put so much effort into such a Terrain would not be intended as a joke. The problem is that 50cm in size is not going to be easy to find even if it was just placed in a small forest. Wait for the update and things will look different and feel much different.

 

Unity's terrain is very frustrating to work with. To answer your question, you want as few terrains as possible, especially if you are using grass. It seems to be very expensive to switch terrains on and off. Unity also uses an internal culling process which I can't find any information on, and it is VERY temperamental. It can completely kill performance if you do something it doesn't like. It wouldn't be a huge issue if it wasn't a virtually undocumented black box solution. I have a sneaking suspicion it is related to grass. Even with grass only rendering a few meters in front of me it completely kills performance, and it's not related to the overdraw, the profiler always points to this culling process. There is definitely room in the market for a decent terrain solution, but unfortunately everything is tied to the Unity terrain.

Edit: This is in regard to very large terrains.

 

We ran into some issues so it took longer than planned BUT we improved many things on the way and it looks at least 2 times better now and should be a bit faster... we compensated that with more eyecandy There are more graphic options to deal with that though...


Starting to upload now!! More detailed post follows when its up. Thanks for all the contibutions to this thread it reall keeps us motivated

Till then,
Peter

ps: It can now be considered a 36 hours demo

 

Thanks - I can't wait to try!

 

Thanks for the update Peter, but what about those of us with an unfair advantage that will not get the demo (Mac) until it is uploaded, whereas Windows users have had more time with it?

We don't really have 36 hours
How does that work?

Just curious

 

I bet it is how many hours they used to make the demo

 

You could very well be right

I just thought they were referring to how long everyone had to find the Easter Egg
LOL

 

Absolutely, though RTP and TerrainComposer do really compensate that quite well. Still, Unity should improve the core of the terrain engine. And finally give us a 64bit Editor!!!

Upload is running...

 

Any estimated time till the upload is done?

 

And now I can be considered 36 Hours awake. But I’m quite happy to do 48. Most of the Time I was learning Terrain Composer which is pretty awesome.

I look forward to the update. Do we get a chopper?

 

about an hour, for the 64bit windows build, the others come after that(not because of any preference but thats just the platform we are testing on and this build was ready first)...

 

Yeah it is indeed

No chopper sorry, they're meant for the roads anyway

 

Great i have Windows 64bit

EDIT: Btw great song for easter egg hunting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBjrWEmYX3M

 

Why not just a web build? That would let both PC and Mac users check it out.

If your just testing stand alone versions, how about a 32-bit for comparison.

 

80% uploaded...

32bit is on the way too 260mb (zipped) is a bit much for a webplayer