Feedback on asset store / re-starting old project

I've been testing out Unity every version, since 5.0X has been released. Tried to re-hash an old project and for many reasons like amount of work / limitations etc. it hasn't been feasable until recently.

So I've been out of the Unity end to end loop for a while, it's a LARGE project so I'll need a helping hand from various places. There may be a lot of things here that are in-correct as it's been a long while so apologies in advance. Just to note, I've been doing this a long while so if you suggest building my own solution for specific systems than that's cool too.!

I'll start with Terrain, so I use world machine with UE and it's fine but it never seems to scale / transfer well into Unity. If you want me to give reasons I can conjure some up.. So terrain choices:

Gaia seems the most popular, there must be a reason right? @hippocoder seems to like World Creator plus it looks very nice and to my eyes the best looking / most detailed goes to map magic. Some control with overhangs / rivers etc. would be nice but to get it looking good I tend to use procedural placement then clean everything up by hand. Procedural spawning etc. I'm not bothered by, I'll do it myself the way I'd like it.

Next up is TOD / water systems, I have Tenkoku and it's ok.. No offence to the author, but to turn it into a streamlined extremely performant system that works / looks like a witcher game would be a fair bit of work (more than $60.00 worth). So I looked into the asset Time of Day, it has Rayleigh/ / Mie which atmospheric scattering is cool and does what a TOD system does I guess. So any feedback on that would be nice..

Water, I think I'll go for Playway unless anyone has other suggestions? Aquas looks cool, or maybe both? It has to look natural as it converges from river to ocean, but I can mask it in particles etc. Flow maps are a necessity so Aquas seems worth it.

If I have a moment of even more crazyness and decide to go with a larger tiled terrain tiles, are there any other suggestions like is world streamer any good? Any caveat's with things like Navmesh / occlusion?

On that note, any decent finite state machines for AI or at least something much better than Unity's navmesh.. Especially if it comes to expanding the game, I'd like to avoid hitting a wall. I've had a fringe look at A* pathfinding, but if someone has made a complex AI infrastructure based on NPC derivative profiles / TOD systems let me know how it worked out.

For shaders I'm pretty much covered, although I am interested in Amplify Shader Editor.. I've been using Uber for a while and think it's great. Although created by the same author never got along with RTP, if I remember correctly you couldn't control per layer POM and paint specific layers into your terrain.. Which you are going to modify your terrain to a certain extent, for stuff like paths and / or rivers. I may be wrong on this, or somebody might have another suggestion?

Finally artwork, pretty much all of it will be custom.. But for terrain I doubt I'd ever be able to beat Megascans, thing is I dislike using ANY pre-made art assets as gamers seem to be funny about it. But logically you can't get any closer to realistic than phsyically scanned, it's like saying the earth asset flips.. Also at $800.00 for two packs alone, I dont' believe that many indie's will use them to build a big game. P.S if Witcher can get away with it, I should be able to .

Any extra suggestions for a semi-openworld game is again appreciated.

 

I'd love to hear your reasons, as I'm currently working on a game with a large terrain. My artist created it with MapMagic, which seems excellent so far and meets our demo's needs easily, but if we carry on with the project any first hand experience with different systems will be appreciated!

Also for my current demo I'm using trueSKY. I find myself talking about it a lot lately, which is high praise in and of itself.

It requires DX11, but the real caveat is that I haven't really looked into how it performs yet. Certainly it's fine for me on my GTX970, but that doesn't really say much. The sky and clouds are a huge part of my game, so to be honest I don't mind spending some cycles on them. And if you don't have to actually be in the clouds in your game I suspect you could tweak its performance needs down quite a bit.

 

Sure, let's say you have a 9X9 tiled world. You of course unload the outer segments until your char arrives at it's destination, but you might have 5 tiles in your line of sight. I've tested Unity's terrain performance a Multitude of times, on an R9 390X I can have longer foliage draw / detail per square meter than most large RPG's I've played although as soon as you have a couple of tiles in view the CPU ms just plummets as the frustum culling's terrain renderstep eats away up to 20 - 30+ ms..

AFAIK and I have researched heavily, there is no way to do anything about it.

So I'm having to essentially chew out a 2048 map and stretch the amount of unit's, then it runs like a dream (60+ FPS no problems).! I mean I can crank the graphics to full (all post at max), use real-time GI, have a decent cascade distance.

Issue being that control plane textures are large and it messes with the size of the paint tools, also the detail resolution per square meter is pretty poor.

If I'm going to do it, I want to avoid half measures.

 

Just a quick update, tried out map magic and Aquas.. Map magic is pretty cool actually, although there are some limitations like being able to draw map segments with / poly's / belzier conversion etc. Which is important so you can occlude specific areas with mountains etc. it was worth the purchase not as a replacement but an addition to world machine, it's far better at adding detail and "spicing" up your terrain.

There's some stuff I need to find out about Aquas before I report on it..