Map Magic World Generator - a node based procedural and infinite game map tool

The area of 400 square kilometers (I guess unity Unit is equal to one meter) is 10 000 units from origin. MapMagic surely works on such distances, but, as malkere noticed, you will face the floating point precision issue here. Hopefully MM has a solution that offsets objects, returning player to origin, so 10 000 units is not a limit.

I test each version at about 1.4M units from the origin (1M by X and 1M by Z axis), that gives an area of 4 million square kilometers. It's more than the world size of The Witcher 3, GTA:SA, GTA5, RDR, Far Cry 5 and Skyrim taken togeter (400 square kilometers, btw, the same size you were concerned of). 10000 times larger. I'm not talking about quality - these maps were skillfully hand made by lots of artists and level-designers - but just emphasizing the size limit is not the main thing to worry about.

The limit I know for sure is 2 147 483 647 pixels (pixel could be bigger or smaller than unit) from origin that is caused by the in coordinate limitation, but it is practically unreachable. You will have to move 248 days at 100 units per second to reach it. I guess there would be some other issues (probably caused by renderer or other Unity causes) long before reaching it.

Yes, this feature is implemented in the upcoming MM2. You can add an existing terrain, use Height In in your graph and Textures Out to paint your terrain procedurally.

 

ok and when MM2 should arive ?
And if i buy MM now i get MM2 free ?

and also with MM atm it not work ?

regards

 

Hi, I'm using MapMagic 1.9.2 and RTP 3.3, with Unity 2018.2.5.
Everything is motly going ok, the textures look really nice if you look at them player-close, however, I haven't been able to find out how to resize how textures are shown on the terrain. All my textures are the same size, each with its normals and height maps, same size also.
I want to enlarge how rock textures are shown in cliffs. They appear too small, and this ends up creating an awful lot of tiling artifacts, that do now go away with RTP resources to deal with artifacts...

Any help will be very appreciated.

 

Normally the "size" setting in the texture output would be what you're looking for, but with RTP you probably need to use the RTP material settings.

 

Yes, all of the texture settings (including the tile size) should be set up via RTP itself.

I have no ETA yet - I'm working on it daily but trying to concentrate on quality and flexibility instead of haste. So I'd rather recommend you don't mind MM2 when considering buying MM. MM is a fully functional product that hopefully worth it's money.

atm?

 

thanks

atm = at the moment

because when buy MM and not work at existing terrain i waste money. because need work at existing terrain.

 

Ah, so you were talking about "editor tool" feature and height input - no, it's not available in the current version. If it is the only or main feature you need I'd like to recommend you postponing buying MM - you will not get this feature right now anyways.
However I can provide you an access to WIP MapMagic2 on GitLab. It's not stable yet and has a flickering interface but it has Height Input implemented. PM or email me your GitLab account (if any) or your email.

 

Hi @Wright, back after a holiday can I just get final info regarding placing main buildings. The correct way to place one building is to lock terrain and then manually place? My confusion lies in the fact I will still want to flatten terrain to put a big building in. Are you saying I should use standard terrain tools to flatten area and then manual place my castle?

Can you still do that when using map magic?

Edit:- to try and add a bit of clarity - I want to flatten any spot i want on the terrain to place important buildings. Perfect use case if possible. I see a spot, say right I want an area 100 sq m flatten so i can nicely add building. Preferably be able to do this several times any spot a want.

Is this possible with MapMagic?

 

Absolutely, yes @AndyNeoman The problem is if you want to make manual changes with the Unity terrain tools and then have MapMagic preserve those changes while applying others, it cannot do that. You will lose your manual changes if you let MapMagic take control and regenerate the terrain. Unless of course you save those changes and reapply with some code which honestly isn't that difficult. Flattening areas for objects is quite simple outside of that.

 

I sended you PM you got it ?

 

This popped up after the new CTS update.

 

I received this error When I use MapMagic and VegetationStudio.And sometimes it will crash Unity.

How can I fix it?

 

This sure does sound promising. I guess floating point errors are best to be avoiding, but... would require some testing.

Very interesting. I recently got GAIA... mainly because its so cheap with that Humble Bundle deal, but while it sure seems to be a great asset, I am more interested in what Map Magic is capable of. What I am hoping to be able to test is... well, limits. The perfect tests as I see it, would be to try to recreate a procedurally generated Earth. Earth is 40k km around the equator around all around the poles. That is a crazy size and... well way beyond what would be needed, but it seems a good enough goal to set. Not that I truly have a hope of achieving it, but as a theoretical idea and something to aim for... well it does not get much better.

Maybe some way of transitioning between different 400 km2 areas? I am guessing it might not fit very well with procedurally generated... and infinite... terrain to be able to do this?

But well... the perfect goal would be to pretty much get it to generate it with a map that looks like Earth... so maybe use the option that does not give an infinite terrain, but instead generates a lot of terrains like the island example, based on bitmaps?

I recently tried Megaton Rainfall... and well, while it is in some ways an incredible game, well... it seems a bit lacking when it comes to creating that world... but still amazing considering what you can do in the game and how fast you can travel. I am thinking to do something like that you would need some way of having several different LoD layer systems. One for being below the cloud level, or for being at the cloud level, one for being so high you can see whole countries, one where you can see all of Earth... which then comes out to the Universe. But switching between all of this... well while the graphics in Megaton Rainfall are pretty simple, its still amazing how well it handles travelling from the ground into space in... I think its in less than a minute. It also does not seem to try to recreate Earth much in any way.

Travelling across the procedurally generated terrain, well, if moving close to the ground I think it would be reasonable making it all pretty much seem like a blur moving at such speeds anyway, then maybe add some confusion effect where you have to adjust your eyes while everything loads around you so it tries to hide what is happening.

Well... how does that sound? I should probably just stick to smaller areas, right?

 

Nothing wrong with aiming high, but I will say what I say to all beginners (sorry if you're not a beginner) start much much smaller. Most people come into Unity wanting to create the next Witcher 3 or WoW, and spend a few months trying to do advanced things, get nothing done, and give up. Probably 80%+. If you want to make something you sure can, but you need to build up your skills to get there. Start with a single map, get the player to move, learn how to save and load, make the player interact with something. Each of those steps is a week or more for some people early on, and your game will suck if you can't do the basics. Take it in small steps.

Having said that, you could control the noise to psuedo-earthlike not so hard. You could for example have a large image and use the alpha channel for height, the red channel for rainfall, the green channel for temperature, draw it up to look somewhat like the Earth and its biomes, and have your noise generator sample roughly from that to generate different biomes depending on you location within a 40,000km map. When you get to one end, you loop back to the other side. That's more or less how Empyrion does it.

If you want to start getting into LODs you're probably going to have to create a custom system which is pretty advanced and performance heavy, see No Man's Sky for example. But still, totally doable. Unity's default terrain LODs are pretty poor performance wise and will only go a few levels, where if you're going in the sky etc you want more like 20+ times less detail.

 

This is such good advice. I actually am from industry (formerly Xbox & Cyan) and my personal gaming project is pretty teeny. I greatly enjoy polishing details on a "humble" game to having a tech demo that looks and plays poorly because it really needs a 100 person team.

Many games are first created with a "vertical slice" - showing a small part of every system - some basic audio, character control, your camera system (save a few months and just learn cinemachine, it's better than most "pro" camera systems.) Do a little world until it's beautiful and FUN, and they'll you'll know how you want to grow it. We used to approve arcade titles at xbox based on 30 seconds of gameplay. The smart folks knew which little bit to build.

 

Thankfully we live on the Earth, not Jupiter which has 10 times bigger circumference.

As for me such sizes are redundant even if you are making space simulator. No one will ever notice the difference between 40 000 km and 4000 km if the scale will change on approaching the ground. The only man who will know the real sizes and the only man who will thrill to the 40K km world would be you as a developer. And it is not the wisest solution to concentrate on the giant features that nobody will notice.

BTW MapMagic works on 40M units, but you can notice some noise artifacts: vertical stripes on the image. All of the other map nodes seem to be working fine, including Voronoi:


But the problem comes when you are trying to place objects - it's not a MapMagic related issue, but floating point numbers limitation in general. Objects have a limited number of positions to set, and most of the objects are "grouped" together at these possible positions:

 

Unity2018.2.3+MapMagic1.9.2.I always receive this error and the terrain always disappears. Does anyone know how to fix this problem?
======
Prepare Error: UnityEngine.MissingReferenceException: The object of type 'Terrain' has been destroyed but you are still trying to access it.
Your script should either check if it is null or you should not destroy the object.
at (wrapper managed-to-native) UnityEngine.Component:get_gameObject ()
at MapMagic.VegetationStudioOutput.CheckAddComponent (MapMagic.Chunk chunk) [0x00041] in D:\testProject\A\Assets\MapMagic\Generators\VegetationStudioOutput.cs:93
at MapMagic.GeneratorsAsset.Prepare (MapMagic.Chunk chunk) [0x0007a] in D:\testProject\A\Assets\MapMagic\Main\GeneratorsAsset.cs:223
at MapMagic.Chunk.PrepareFn () [0x0000c] in D:\testProject\A\Assets\MapMagic\Main\Chunk.cs:217
at MapMagic.ThreadWorker.PrepareFn () [0x0001d] in D:\testProject\A\Assets\MapMagic\Main\ThreadWorker.cs:505
UnityEngine.Debug:LogError(Object)
MapMagic.ThreadWorker.repareFn() (at Assets/MapMagic/Main/ThreadWorker.cs:518)
MapMagic.ThreadWorker:UpdateApply() (at Assets/MapMagic/Main/ThreadWorker.cs:213)
MapMagic.ThreadWorker:Refresh() (at Assets/MapMagic/Main/ThreadWorker.cs:143)
MapMagic.MapMagic:Update() (at Assets/MapMagic/Main/MapMagic.cs:272)
UnityEditor.EditorApplication:Internal_CallUpdateFunctions()
======

 

from CTS Dev:

"CTS 1.8 now dynamically generates snow noise, so this parameter is no longer required. We do not control the MapMagic integration, so please contact Dennis and let him know that it has changed. Get him to contact me if he would like some help with the latest changes - we have made modifications in the latest release that should enable CTS to work much more nicely with MapMapic."

 

Hi. I need help.
I try to log each terrain's creation time.
So I'm looking for a nice place in code to start a stopwatch.
Where is that wonderful place?
I am also looking for a good ideas to measure the creation time for each Terrains.

P.S. I am not an English speaker. I used a translator. I am sorry my poor English.

 

Just sent an email to request access to the MM2 beta. Would love to try out the new functionalities and finally forget about terrain margin issues... They're the only (sadly major) flaw in an otherwise awesome tool

 

I'm coming back from a few weeks away and am finding I'm in the same boat as other MM users who also use CTS... the most recent update to CTS is now leading MM to throw a hard stop error in the console that reads:

Assets/MapMagic/Generators/CustomShaderOutput.cs(1160,74): error CS1061: Type `CTS.CTSProfile' does not contain a definition for `m_snowNoiseTextureIdx' and no extension method `m_snowNoiseTextureIdx' of type `CTS.CTSProfile' could be found. Are you missing an assembly reference?​

According to the makers of CTS, CTS 1.8 now dynamically generates snow noise, so this parameter is no longer required... and since they don't control how MapMagic integration works, they can't fix it.

Any ideas on how I can get this to work?

 

I bought CTS years ago and haven't been using it. Just began trying it out for the first time (with Map Magic of course, what am I gonna do, sculpt a terrain by hand like a common peasant!) got this same "m_snowNoiseTextureIdx" error and thought I must have been doing something wrong. So yeah, fixing this would be much appreciated

 

Hey guys,
Maybe you can help me out here:
I need to have (some) emissive terrain textures for my current project. Is there a (shader) package I can use that works with MapMagic ?

Thanks !

 

Have you deleted the terrain tile with Vegetation System component assigned? Try un-pinning all of the tiles and pin them again.

Quick fix. Yes, it was a big upgrade with refactoring. I'll ask Adam to implement some purely CTS functions from MapMagic to simplify further changes.

Actually you can use any material with the Custom Shader Output. But note that it should be a pure material - rather rare thing on the Asset Store. Usually materials require script components, and they will not work without MM integration.

 

That fix works, thanks!

 

Indeed. Yes, I barely know how to use the basics of MapMagic yet, and for this to work it will need something like 3 or more systems to handle different ways of using LODs and such.

I have thought about it and the main way to make it possible to travel at very high speeds could be to do something like the hyperspace effect in Star Trek, but with... well everything, so if you travel at a certain speed where you know you will not be able to load everything fast enough, you switch to another type of movement mode where you vision becomes a type of blur where everything is just moving past you fast, so you cannot really see anything, maybe unless its far ahead of you, in which case it would not need to be especially detailed. Moving out of this mode, you will then need to focus your eyes again, and that time will then to used to load the stuff around you that you would be near you.

Its probably too big a project for me... but I will probably setup something much simpler anyway. My plan so far is to make a travel system where you mainly "fast travel" to different locations, rather than actually travelling through all of the landscape. Which probably means needing some kind of loading screen or scene though. Seems like a better starting point, then I can try to look into the more advanced stuff later. Just being able to actually use Dungeon Architect together with Map Magic is probably going to be quite the challenge in itself.

 

Question? why would you be making terrain for a gas giant? If you want a level on Jupiter set up a fog layer a few meters under a floating city structure.

 

Yep, as far as I know Jupiter has no solid terrain. But we were talking about sizes, and it was just exaggeration.

 

Spent multiple hours today trying to get MapMagic and Microsplat to work together. Even just on one pinned terrain was kind of a nightmare. I do have the script that's meant to refresh microsplat terrains in playmode, and despite that the textures kept randomly changing every time I'd save, or enter/exit playmode, or connect a node and suddenly all the textures are blown out almost white, or occasionally just refresh the scene window and all the textures seemed to change places!

Finally realized that the custom shader node seems to be constantly resetting the control texture names and count. Happens even when the map data is saved as an external asset. Definitely when entering/exiting playmode, and possibly at other times as well. Is this expected behavior? Going to go into a padded room and scream for a while now, that's several hours of my life gone.

MapMagic seems cool though Hopefully it's just a recent bug or I'm missing something obvious?

 

It's not a bug - unfortunately MapMagic is just not compatible with MicroSplat. Yet. But it will be since v2.

However as far as I know some users made it working.

 

Having read every post on this forum and microsplat's about integrating the two, it seems like people have gotten it to work in the past - did that change at some point? It might be a good idea to mention that they're definitely not compatible as a warning in the documentation (under custom shader node, or wherever else third party integration is mentioned) as reading the forums REALLY gave me the wrong idea.

Thanks for the quick heads up, and looking forward to v2.

*edit*

Yeah, I tried the syncing script. I get incredibly inconsistent behavior with or without that script. The terrain not reflecting changes to the custom shader node and just displaying the base terrain texture no matter the inputs, the custom shader node reverting to the default setting for number of control textures and the names of the control textures going back to _ControlTex0 etc., the terrain randomly turning white and only changing back when I hit the sync button on the microsplat terrain component, the terrain turning white and just staying that way even if I do hit the sync button other times. Something just seems really broken.

 

I haven't tried this script myself, so I can't say whether it works or not. There were no major changes in CSO node since that time - however it's MS that could be changed. So if anybody could make MapMagic+Microsplat work please let us know if you get any issues with that script.

Adding a mention in the documentation would be an overkill: the only source you could find that MS could be compatible is this forum thread, and since you've read forum you could notice me saying it's not officially compatible for two times at the last three pages. I can't write all of the assets MM is not compatible with - but I've listed the assets that works with MM in the AS product description, and MS is not one of them. Sorry to hear you've been mislead by other users, but they are free to say it - what if they really got it working with no issues?

 

I use MicroSplat without problems, though I run on MM 1.84, and my MicroSplat hasn't been updated in months either. It is always a bit fussy when I try to set it up, once it works I tend to not touch it though... Are you using pinned terrain in runtime? I generate everything in runtime. Other than that it's just making sure the shader on the terrains is correct, and the MicroSplatTerrain script is getting on them with the correct material template and prop data.

 

I've been using them together for months - it's not as smooth as it (hopefully) will be, but I'm able to tune and test relatively quickly. Works great at runtime.

 

Thanks for the responses everyone! I'm running on the newest versions of MicroSplat and MapMagic, so that could be a key difference. Most of the time I spent fiddling was in a new project I created in Unity 2018.2.4f1 with only MicroSplat and MapMagic imported.

But it could also just be that the ways I've tried to set it up are different from what other people have gotten to work, and I just haven't found the right approach yet. There are several variables here, I think:

1.) I am doing all the editing in playmode.
2.) I've been mostly trying to work on one pinned terrain. Is this the wrong approach to get things working well?
3.) I've been trying to use MapMagic's Custom Shader node set to "Custom" in order to output textures. Do other people use different setups? Maybe just the regular texture output node? Do people rename the control texture names on the Custom Shader node to match the names in the microsplat shader? In my versions, the Custom Shader node seems broken when used with MicroSplat: it resets the list of control texture names whenever deserialization is triggered in the Unity Editor (entering playmode, etc.) So every time I want to enter playmode I have to set up a bunch of things on the Custom Shader node over again.
4.) Should the main MapMagic component have a custom material refereced (set to the microsplat template material), and if this is important, should "Assign Material" be unchecked or checked? Should this setting just be left on "Built in Standard" instead?
5.) The microsplat sync terrains script should go on the root MapMagic game object, I've been assuming?

I feel like I've tried every permutation of these things, and a few more, but I could be wrong!

Thanks again all.

 

If you're using a pinned terrain you don't need the sync script and in fact it won't do anything. For any pinned terrains you just need to have the MicroSplatTerrain script on them with properly populated public variables.

You don't need to mess with things on the MapMagic side at all. Just use the normal texture output and built-in shader. The sync script can go anywhere (though usually not on the master MapMagic Terrain), it just needs to register the callbacks for OnGenerate so that it can assign the MicroSplatTerrain script and populate it's variables. It will override the terrain shader settings itself.

So you should try have MapMagic generate around camera turned on. Have the sync script on something (the MapMagic parent is a bad idea if you are copying components from the parent to generated terrains). Just make an empty GameObject and put it on there and give it your prop data/MicroSplat material. Then hit play. MapMagic should generate some terrains, and the sync script should add the MicroSplatTerrain script to each of them. If the script isn't on them, or if the shader isn't being changed, or if the material/prop data isn't being applied properly, are all different problems you'll need to deal with independently after you figure out which step is going wrong.

 

on this note, the generator can at least handle a full size planet earth right?

 

Yes. You can make earth-sized terrains with MapMagic, it will generate the land and will bring you no error, but you might run in some engine-relative limitations. You will face the same problems by creating terrain of such sizes by hand too. MM's floating origin solution can fix some of them (like z-fighting or shadows), but some could not be fixed no matter of what. Main thing to mention it's object positions precision:

 

Hello, I'm considering using MM because it looks amazing and I believe it does everything I need. First, please know that the support website link on the asset store page is currently broken, goes to a 404. Also, the evaluation download is broken.

1. How will biomes work on an infinite map? I've seen the tutorial for blending biomes but it seems limited to a fixed map so it's not clear how I could position and blend them for an infinite map.
2. I assume so, but can maps be generated when my players start a new game, using a specific seed? Each new game will generate a random seed by default, so I need MM to use it so the maps are different.
3. Voxeland works with any terrain generated by MM, correct?
4. When MM2 comes out, any idea what it will cost to upgrade for MM1 users?

Thanks!

 

Thanks! Yeah, I know, it's my site host problem, I've talked to them and they are aware, and, hopefully, solving it. I expect the site be online today.

Biomes work both in pinned and infinite terrains. Maybe I've missed to show that in the videos, but they work fine in playmode on non-pinned chunks.

Sure.

Voxeland is a mesh terrain and it does not work with the standard terrains. MapMagic can generate either Voxeland using Voxeland outputs, or standard terrains, but not both at the same time.

I've got some ideas about MM2 price and the way MM1 could be upgraded, but it's still not settled down. If you considering buying MM (or, generally speaking, any other asset) try to find out if it suits your needs here and now - the money you pay are for the asset, not it's evolution.

 

Any estimated release time for MM2? And where can I check its new contents?
Also, will MM2 use unity 2018.2's jobs system along with burst compiler? Or it will stay to its own multithreading methods?

 

in Trees there is property Color variation

but from map magic its missing? how do i add color variation



without color variation billboards look very plain

 

You can take a look at MM2 beta at GitLab - email me your order number to get an access. Unfortunately I don't have ETA yet.

It will use the standard System threading. I can see no advantage of the jobs system when speaking about MM - they are neither faster nor easier to use if you know how things work, and after all they use the standard threads internally. Maybe I'm missing something, so I'm ready to discuss it and change my point.

The color variation isn't a property of the tree instance, it's just terrain editor randomly sets it's color when placing a tree. I could make the trees output generator to pick the color at random, but honestly it's the first time someone is requesting this feature. I will make it in MM2 if I get more requests.

 

not sure if it change anything really, but the burst compiler is math aware and can do some more optimization automatically, so that might be a slight edge? I really don't know.

 

Is there a tutorial for how to use biomes on an infinite map? I've picked out bits and pieces from the videos so I know how to create them (saving them, clicking edit mode, etc), but I don't understand how to set them up in an infinite map. I figured that some noise value should drive which biomes appears where, but I don't seem to be able to get it working.

 

Yeah, got to test it. I don't really know what is under the hood, the only information I found at glance were videos showing 50% performance gain with some sort of black magic. Don't know if it will work in case of MM, so I'm going to find it out one day.

There's no difference between using biomes on limited terrain and infinite map. The only distinction is in using infinite mask (like noise) instead of gradient in the video.
You say you were not able to get it working - do you have some issues with it or just don't know where to start? If so try using this tutorial and just run it in the infinite mode.

 

The second, I just didn't know where to start. That was actually the video I've been basing my first approach on but am unsure how to translate what you did to what I want.

How do I determine biome dynamically? I can't figure out how to do that, since input/output connections for nodes affect the actual noise values of my biomes.

Once I have that figured out I'll need to find a way to blend them. That's more clear in your tutorial video, although I'm not sure the "gradient z" option would be best for an infinite terrain.

EDIT: After digging, I found this video: 1.5 beta biomes which helps. However, since that video uses noise for one biome and inverted noise for a second, I'm not sure how that would work with multiple biomes.

EDIT2: Playing around with the same concepts from that video though, all I seem to be getting are "merges" of my biomes. My mountains get lower, my deserts become more "sandy mountains" than deserts. Granted, the current version is not quite 1:1 of the old one, so either it won't work like that anymore or I'm doing something wrong. No matter what, I still need to support multiple biomes though. This is just practice.

 

Hello Denis,
Recently I get the following error message with every chunk that is generated:

Destroying assets is not permitted to avoid data loss.

If you really want to remove an asset use DestroyImmediate (theObject, true);

UnityEngine.Object:DestroyImmediate(Object)

MapMagic.Chunk:OnMove(Coord, Coord) (at Assets/MapMagic/Main/Chunk.cs:131)

MapMagic.ChunkGrid`1:Deploy(CoordRect[], CoordRect[], Object, Boolean) (at Assets/MapMagic/Main/ChunkGrid.cs:356)

MapMagic.MapMagic:Update() (at Assets/MapMagic/Main/MapMagic.cs:234)

​

Also happens in empty projects. Unity version 2018.2.7f1.
What's it all about? Would be cool if there is a fix for it in the next version.

PS: die of curiosity about version 2.0

 

Hi,

found a bug in CustomShaderOutput.cs, line 932: RTP's control maps are recently named _Control1 instead of _Control_1. When clicking "Update now", control maps were deleted before.

Anyway, am still trying to fix another malfunction working with rtp and map magic in U5.6 seen below:



Some Terrains receive correct material, while others do not. Still don't know what goes wrong.

Best,
Andre

Edit:
Legacy rtp output component works in combination with instant updater component attatched to mm Go.

 

I can't figure out for the life of me how to 'save' the tiles so that I can use them while also having them tied to CTS. I get the terrain data out fine, but there doesn't seem to be a working control file with it that I can find. Am I looking in the wrong spot? If I try baking it using CTS it just bakes as the first color and nothing else (unless normals are turned on). Anyone have any experience with this?