HORIZON[ON] - Bridge the gap between the sky and your scenery.

Thank you Tom! I've been checking here every single day to see. Guess I'll need to be a bit more patient. ( I'll still check every day for interests sake though )

 

Would it be also possible in a future update, not necessarily release to get some form of tinting control at run-time on masks or splats used to simulate seasons. This for me would remove any benefits of using substances.

Has there been any word on how much the scripts will be exposed?

Really cant wait for this asset, I've been checking this thread daily for a while now

 

Time to get out of my cave i think was working like a maniac the last weeks testing/polishng everything and when i thought i was ready for release Tom mentioned something about snow

i am really excited where this is going and that there seems to be so much interest in Horizon[ON]. Toms words were: "polished to the metal" I am really proud that his opinion is so high and without his help this would never be where it is now... Chances are somewhere around 99,999% that Horizon[ON] will be submitted to the Assetstore this week.

Here is some more very humble teasing... running on my notebook, proper FPS Counter is in the upper left corner.

without Horizon[ON]:


with the absolute feature minimum:


with all features enabled(though that does not show all possibilities):


Though the editor is in DX11 mode, there is no tesselation used here, but you could if you want. Snow is (just like everything else) dynamic and fluidly changing seasons is easy as pie! Actually, with the dynamic displacement you could even grow a vulcano in realtime. Ahh, so much to tell, i guess i just have to get it out of the door, so you can see yourself

Peter

 

Hey peter! That's fantastic news!! I cant wait to get my hands on this asset. Personally for me, I don't need the snow but i'm sure many others will love that feature. Waiting patiently for this to land on the asset store so I can snap it up immediately. (please please please can it be this week though )

 

Great news. Cant wait to integrate this with my project and delve into as you mentioned fluidly changing season and snow. Congratulations Peter on creating what I believe to be a new best seller on the asset store.

 

Late to the table as usual. This looks absolutely wonderful, just what's needed. What's the performance hit like between horizon off/on?

 

Above screens show an fps counter. The screensize, anisotropic filtering, antialiasing, texture sizes all need to be higher so you can see difference in FPS compared to an empty scene. I am very happy with the performance. Since it's fast and scaleable i think there wont be complaints

 

Ty. From what I've seen so far, I'm sold.

 

Look marvelous! One of a kind asset, hope you have a big success at the store.

Is it possible to tell us more about how the system works? What textures we need to input to Horizon for regular usage ? What is the output? a cubemap? scene geometry? Can we use it with Unity 5 features?

Thanks

 

Looks i have missed a few questions...

You can definitely walk up to the edge to few meters distance (and have a convincing look). There are plenty of options to give the closeup more detail. if you then put some additional dressing on top(vegetation and/or other objects) even picky designers(and players) should be happy. If you use textures that go well with your terrain, you wont be able to tell where the terrain ends.

I dont use Substances anymore as i ran into to many troubles with them. I haven't tested if they work with Horizon[ON] but if i remember correctly they behave just like regular textures and those can of course be assigned. For Snow and other stuff that potentially need to be dynamic i think you'll be happy out of the box.

See my reply to Virror's post above... about how it works... magic upcoming demos and videos will shed some more light on the technical side.

Man, that webplayer... it feels like Horizon[ON] has evolved from stoneage to postmodern since its release. I look forward to release the new demo. Sorry for not replying to your mail btw

It supports Unity5 spherical harmonic diffuse lighting. I am not an expert on U5 yet and generally avoid jumping on the beta train too soon. Especially when i see how Tom is constantly changing RTP to work with the latest beta, i don't envy him.

 

Thanks too

It uses geometry, there are too many features and ways to use it so its hard to give more info just yet. The upcoming demo(s) will show more and there will also be videos that explain things in detail. What kind of textures you want to use is up to you, You can use Horizon[ON] for a stylized comic antsimulator as for a realistic flight simulator the like... How you use it is up to you. I made sure i put no restrictions in there and also tried to make it really simple to use, i am quite happy with the results but soon the Assetstore reviews will tell (fingers crossed).

 

At last..!
I've been waiting for months!

 

Hi Peter - no worries about the mail I totally understand - Quickly on the note of substances, I also have found they cause a lot of problems and indeed can cause unity to crash quite often. I would only ever use them if the results were pre-baked and exported to a regular texture, so I am glad there is no substances in horizon.

So does this mean you have submitted it to the asset store review??

 

I am currently writing all the tooltips for the controls, half of them are done and the rest will be done tomorrow, then only an update to the documentation is needed, which is actually already finished but some changes were made since i wrote the docs, also Toms latest additions(snow and layer tint/saturation) need to be documented. So no, it's not submitted yet but i am pretty sure i am able to submit this week.

Here a little bit for the tweakers and interface fetishists... The Horizon[ON] Master Controller, a tool to manage all 6 shaders at once. It's completely context sensitive and shows only what is actually enabled and used by its children. So, it can be either very small or huge like in the image.

I attach it as a thumbnail so this page does not get twice as long just because one image

 

Wow. With so many features its AMAZING that you've managed to keep draw calls so law and performance so high! I will be using this on pretty big terrains of about 2000X1000 so very keen to see how it looks. On that note, it does work on rectangular shaped terrains right? Or only square? I guess I should have asked that a while ago And any estimation on the retail price as of yet?

 

2000*1000, i would consider that as rather small, Nathaniel and i have been using it on 900km² terrains

Price will be decided in the last minute, but it will be friendly Rectangular terrains are ok. I should state that the smooth blending feature works only if the terrain is flattened on the outside edges(i believe i mentioned that a few times), blending is in many cases not neccesary. The transition could also be hidden behind a hill or in other creative ways. Its possible to flatten only on one side and do a blend only where it is desired. Just saing that so nobody is expecting that the blend area conforms magically to every terrain...

If somebody wants to have a perfect blend without flattening the outside edge of the terrain, the only way is to model a custom mesh for that. But again, doing the transition just by intersection or placing the terrain above Horizon[ON] gives great results too.

 

Are you streaming in the terrain? As I find if I make a terrain that's over 2KM, after the player has moved 2000 from the origin point, the players hand (FPS) starts shaking like he's craving something due to floating point inaccuracy. Sadly for me re-centering the world is not an option as it does not work with Unity's static batching (At least not to my knowledge).

I have no problems making sure the terrain is flattened at the edges, and even then just placing a fence at that point. As long as it looks like it goes on forever (which according to the web-demo - it does )

 

We used world shifting if the player has moved more than 5km, about static batching yes thats a problem, actually i dont remember how we solved this, could it be that before unity 4.5 static objects could be moved anyway? Could also be that we didn't set the terrains to static... they aren't batched anyway or atleast not very efficiently... i think your shaking issue comes from a too close near clip plane, solution to that would be to use a seperate camera only for the hands/gun/whatever and use a very low farclip plane to compensate and regain some depth precision. that way you can also use a slightly different FOV for the hands, which can be in some ways benefitial. Anyway, around 2km there should be no problem with shaking, for us it was only noticeable after 5 km. Luckily its very simple to test if its a nearclip issue.

 

I am already using 2 separate cameras, with alternate FOV etc, I have also experimented with the near clip plane and no dice. I guess the breathing animations of the player just become more noticeable as the floating point precision is lost. Although shaky hands are the least of my worries when in those situations Anyways, I will stop there to prevent myself from going back on my own words, and taking the thread off the subject of horiz[ON], I'm happy with the size of my terrains for the purpose of the game i'm making, its just the flat "Galileo was wrong" effect towards the ends, so am confident horiz[ON] will fix my problems. Watching this thread relentlessly. Even if there are any problems we might encounter in the initial release, I will be happy to be a part of the process

 

Had some time to play around a bit with the new dynamic snow feature...

 

Looks amazing!!! Is that Unity 5 Procedural skybox or TOD?

 

This is just the skydome i made and include with the example scene...

 

That is insane! Looks incredible.

 

very impressive. Can it turn it's work into actual terrain or mesh? That's easily good enough for wonderful terrains.

 

Looks great.

 

Yes you can use it for terrains, but there are some limitations, for example Horizon[ON] does not cast or receive shadows... It is just not meant for that and it would be out of the shadowdistance anyway, however shadows could be baked into textures and it would give a nice terrain but really i suggest to use RTP for terrains and Horizon[ON] for the scenic vistas in mid and far range distance. The good thing is that you can really walk much closer to the edge of your terrain(s) and therefor can make terrains much smaller. Saving a lot of performance this way and at the same time improve the look of your scenes dramatically.

However the terrain in the middle is actually a very lowpoly mesh shaded with Horizon[ON], as i want to have the examplescene really match up with the presentation and i cant include 3rd party terrain shaders in the pack(plus the unity terrain shader just does not give me the results i want). So, i just missused the included "Horizon[ON] Object" shader.

 

I am currently updating the docs to include all the changes and new features Tom and i made lately, I took a lot of screenshots for the step by step getting started guide and as i was looking through them i realized they make a pretty nice GIF animation of the basic workflow...

 

Incredible

 

Looking forward to this!

 

Will the getting started tutorial touch on multi tiled terrains?

 

i dont see how it would be different with Horizon[ON]... if you have questions i'll help you out as good as i can. But maybe i am overlooking something. I think the number of terrains does not really matter for Horizon[ON]. If you mean arbitrary placed terrains, i think it is possible to work something out but i dont know if it can be generalized. In that case it would not be covered by the tutorial.

 

Spectacular is the least i can say

 

release! release! release!

 

I'm on it

I just finished the Getting started PDF, some might take a look at it already:
Horizon[ON] - Manual

Up to the next task, updating a few things on the Manual...

edit: changed the link to the manual.

 

So what you said about no shadows... then it won't work with a real-time direct light in the scene where the time of day changes? Or the lighting brightness works at least?

 

Sure, lighting is independent of shadows...
As you can see in the TOD compatibility test video, there is realtime lighting and even realtime IBL coming from a render to texture HDR cubemap.

 

Interesting, the manual says switch to forward rendering, but in Unity5 the default/preferred method is deferred rendering.

 

Did it really say you should switch to forward? I think its only coincidence that it is set to forward on the image. Horizon[ON] will always be rendered in forward (which is the most efficient way in this case here) regardless of your project setting.
So you dont have to set your project to forward

Thanks for pointing out this potential cause of confusion. I will make a note there in the guide!

 

Cool I'm no expert on the pros and cons of the different rendering options (I've read the page in the unity manual, and am still not much wiser), so thought I'd better check

 

You can say, if you have many lights deferred is faster, if you have only one light, forward is faster. This is a vast generalisation but a good rule of thumb. Also if you set your project to deferred it does not mean everything will be rendered in deferred, transparent objects for example are still rendered in forward.

 

I can't wait to use this on my Unity 4.x based project. Hope it makes it on the asset store soon!

EDIT: By the way, what's it look like near the edges of a terrain if you don't smooth the edges down to the same height?

 

This looks great!
the tool integrates with Wold Composer/Terrain Composer/RTP or just the latter two?

meaning, can it (somehow) work on WC / sat photos (magically?).or is it dependent on splat maps?
What about Trees..lots of em..how would you deal with em..I am having a hard time, I am using a big plane with a low res sat image as a huge 'Horizon'..it works..kinda of.. at..a distance..but the fog and trees..I think it is an inherent game rendering issue/device target...there is so only much you can visually render.(target-android)
p-

 

@ForceVFX, Have you looked into Turbo Forest? It's designed to help speed up flyover trees. Maybe that could help you.

 

There are 3 ways to deal with Terrain vs Horizon[ON]:

1. Blend with a flattened terrain border. It's simple and gives great results.

2. Intersection, if the used textures match in colors this can be a simple and great solution that does not have the need of flattening. You can also model your own intersection mesh to have more control over where the intersection is happening. The intersection can also be hidden by decals, vegetation, stones... you name it, be creative. Intersections are seen in all videogames, it really depends how you deal with them.

3. Floating terrain, Horizon[ON] can just be placed below the terrain, this is the most simple way. Can also look great if the terrain is not flat on the end(if it would be you would just go for option 1). The player should not be able to walk right on the edge... if you have ways to stop the players before the edge, this is just fine...

(4.) This is in brackets because i have not tested it, theoretically you could do a blend with uneven terrain as well but it would need some fiddly moddeling of a mesh for blending. Probably the pixel error of terrains would be your enemy here. If you have the time to experiment i think you could work something out but no guarrantee on that.

 

I think Horizon[ON] would be perfect for that, Tom helped me to implement displacement baking. Only very few mobiles can do displacement of vertices with textures, so it is necessary to bake the displacement, if you want to use the cool displacement features for mobile. Plus you can have collision too, which is otherwise not possible. However, to get the maximum framerate out of it for mobiles, i would recommend to use a flat horizon with just a plane for collision and use the non displaced blendmeshes(which of course can have colliders). These blend meshes can add hills(and cliffs) to Horizon[ON] at a very low cost.

About TC/WC, those are outstanding tools and their output can be used in many ways. Actually it does not matter where you take the maps(Color, Normals, Height) from, you can use them for horizon just like you would expect. Using TC/WC to generate the maps that you need works just fine. Big recommendation from me for this.

About the trees, there are many ways to deal with that, but i think you are on a good track, drawcalls are a bit high for mobile but still in manageable range if you optimize more... you could use a disolve shader based on distance to fade the far distance trees away. At higher distance they can just be painted on. you would not need to draw them that far then and also dont see the harsh line where they stop.

Anyway, trees or not, if you make your sat images tileable in photoshop and blend them on Horizon[ON] with a tileable mask, you can have the textures to appear as high resolution, while its actually a lower resolution in reality... and the horizon can go on to infinity. I am very curious to see more of your project with Horizon[ON], it seems to be a perfect usecase.

 

Thanks that gives me a much better idea of the approach I will take.

 

Horizon[ON] is submitted to the assetstore
Post 1 is updated...

 

Duuude. Link to AS doesn't work! Do something! Quick!

 

yes its still pending review lets hope it will be approved!

 

After years of gaming 126900
I'm sure I can do even better than this score.
Is it possible to change our score during the month?
Am I suppose to post hi-scores here?