How would 2019.1 terrain improvements covered at GDC be shipped?

At GDC Unity showcased a lot of terrain features including hydraulic/thermal/wind erosion brushes as well as other improvements like different brush UI, distance normal maps being generated on the fly and so on. They were specifically called out as something already included in 2019.1 - but they are nowhere to be seen in the 2019.1 beta releases. I'm assuming they might be distributed in some repository or package, since simply holding them back for a later 2019.1 release would be a little strange now that it's no longer in an alpha stage. Am I missing an unlisted package somewhere, or are these tools and terrain system improvement absent from 2019.1 after all?

Talk I'm referring to can be found on the first page of GDC Vault that went live today: https://www.gdcvault.com/browse/gdc-19#page-1 and is called "Hot New Terrain Features and the Road Ahead" (by Chad Foxglove).

I'd appreciate any info on this!

 

It's my understanding they'll be using package manager for the task as it's tooling.

 

Oh - Very interesting - Cheers @artyom-zuev - I'm checking out the vid right now.

 

When is this going to happen?
I would need this in 2019.1.

 

There is a roadmap included in the video @konsic

 

I can't access the video. What is the roadmap ?

 

Terrain Mesh painting tools (3 types - e.g. paint/sculpt water erosion) alongside 2019.1 - material updates for 2019.2 - 'cave' painting/deformation 2019.3 - New Non Destructive Material Layers for 2020...
something like that.

Oh yeh - some kind of management panel - which should I think allow for improved importing of height maps over multiple/tiled terrains - something like that

(personally I was hoping for a lot more - but it's good progress and seems part of a longer plan)​

 

The material layers act exactly like photoshop according to Unity staff on discord.

The intention (things can change):

• pan layers around
• blend modes
• opacity etc

So we can (I assume!) just work like PS, and move whole part of mountain and it's erosion etc where we want and so on. Seems like a big job but ultimately better than procedural if you want to make a true gamer's game. Sounds like a lot of fun.

Also mentioned was some kind of splatting going on too, exciting times.

 

Sounds good, wake me up when it's out to use.

 

Hehe, I think they plan it from anytime from now til 2020+ so it will be on package manager, from what I have heard on discord. I don't want anyone thinking this is gospel, wait until you see it on roadmap or package manager. Also they may change anything at any time which is why we're not seeing roadmaps I guess

 

I heard there'll be holes in terrains in 2025.3.x

 

Well I want to hear that voxel terrain will be an officially supported terrain system, finally holes, caves that you can just sculpt in, supported directly with some chunking system allows for massive areas..... yes is various assets but yknow something official with the performance, tooling and integration would be good.

 

Full PBR voxel terrains, with runtime deformation ability, multi tiles, LODding, proper (working) trees, infini-grasses / imposter system - in under 0.5ms per frame. That'd be ideal. Yes.

 

@wyatttt
Thanks for clarifying this! Am I understanding correctly that the plan is to publish the 2019.1 features as a package alongside 2019.1.0f1 release, or are they slated to be released at some later point in the 2019.1 lifetime, like 2019.1.2? I initially assumed that brushes demoed at GDC would become available as a preview package during the 2019.1 beta period, since making work-in-progress packages publicly available and marking them as "preview" during the beta period has been standard practice for Unity for a while.

 

Aside from it all just coming in the future, I see nothing on terrain streaming, you can take UE as comparison with what they do with the world mapping tools and terrain streaming... built in...along with there networking support... doing that with Unity seems to be problem with finding various third party assets and seeing if and getting them to all play nicely together.. ideally this stuff should be integrated perhaps tied in with the newer networking framework... for those who want a setup that just works and they can get on with world building without having to mess with various third party tools just to get the base stuff all started before even getting to the part of actually building what players will see, ie the bit that is even cared about at the end of the day.

 

Unity said is has it in mind from a past thread somewhere here. But DOTS is all about streaming so it's probably best not to do work twice as far as Unity's concerned.

DOTS is frankly an amazing stack of tech that supports streaming well due to how efficiently data can be shunted around.

 

yeah the streaming part I'm talking about is the network side of it aswel, and that being handled in a way that we can configure with terrain sizes etc something a little more better tested for making realistic game experiences for desktop and maybe mobile configuration etc ie low mid high, none of this and now we'll let you spend ages trying to get it right mentality.

I'm fine with having the low stuff to do it all yourself, but like UNET was created to make doing network games easier, terrain streaming and everything surrounding it including AI visibility is always going to be a specialist field.. and it would be nice if Unity hired some specialists to come up with a solution that can work for making these sorts of games a little better than how it currently is.

 

I'm not fine with DIY and it gets on my nuggets that I might have to dig in and handle things manually in 2019. Unity promises and it's time to pay the piper. Don't think for a minute that I'll let Unity off the hook. I might even nag them

Regarding mip streaming. I had asked staff about it in respect to terrain, and they said terrain has it's own thing going on so it's likely it will have all that later with DOTS or some fancy stuff. But at least I know it's not as simple as "lets use mip streaming to load in heightmaps/splats".

Still would love a staff update

 

You better be doing you-things that you want to do - or else!

 

Any news on when the features originally planned to coincide with 2019.1 release would actually come out?