[Official] New Terrain System

That video has been posted couple page back. Like i said, it's a myth.

 

Oh, sorry, my bad. Forgot that Unity Team feeds their plans and just teasing the whole community. Nice way to tell about roadmap and after that make a remark that it's just the ideas

 

I think I saw Nested Prefabs also in Unite 2015 or 2016. But I may have been seeing unicorns, who knows. But at least nested prefabs is still into the "todo" list. Terrain was moved from: next update, to "into development" to into "research" to into "somewhere there, next to mars exploration". Basically instead of moving forward, it kept been pushed backwards.

 

It's a hard job because when you have an engine that has a massive ecosystem like asset store likely using it in all sorts of ways, you need to make moves that are future proof. I think part of the problem here is that Unity is closed source and terrain is a fundamental built in feature.

I think the solution is that terrain is NOT a fundamental built in feature but one of many optional packages you can add to Unity. This way, Unity can make a new terrain just a year after their old terrain, and break compatibility because the user chooses to use a specific package.

This is kind of happening with Scriptable Render Pipeline. They can choose to make a new pipeline asset whenever and it doesn't affect the main engine or editor but everyone benefits.

So I'm hoping this package approach will work for whatever terrain they go with as well. You know, keeping it (gasp) modular.

 

i think they still focusing on improving the instancing part i guess.

 

#WeNeedNewTerrainSystem

 

It's coming, book of dead is part of the process

 

When is the talk about book of the dead? it's on GDC isn't?

 

Yup.

 

Who are you? Derrick, I consider myself something of an expert in video game terrain (I made terrain for Mechwarrior4, Crimson Skies, Halo, Smuggler's Run, & Savage Quest, (which was great because I got to make primitive plants and trees) and, well I like to mod games and make maps for grand strategy games)

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
Spacegame with space-ship

How does terrain fit into that?
Its doesn't really, but I just love making worlds...

What use-cases, features, workflows do you have or would like to see?
deformation maps onto spheres would be nice...

 

https://makingofbookofthedeadqawiththe.splashthat.com/

 

Is that so?

 

https://forum.unity.com/threads/fee...e-render-pipelines.470095/page-9#post-3414519
"Starting" Uhm, so... no new terrain system at GDC?

 

You got Gaia, RTP3, CTS, MegaSplat, Vegetation Studio among others.
If Unity brings a terrain system i'm not sure it will be better than those.

 

Those extensions are not terrain systems, they use the old unity one with its limitations and shortcomings.

 

https://twitter.com/kgordon077/status/953331629673668608
https://mobile.twitter.com/vesseff/status/953560738139865088

Look I'm not syaing this is the terrain things, I'm saying it's one of the needed step toward it, just like:
- proper gpu instancing
- job system
- Scriptable rendering
- etc ...

Basically they are going through the prerequisite one by one, hence hwy we don't have actual news about the terrain system, what we have is the whole shebang broken in steps and requirement and these step turned into their own project. You'll have the terrain system at the end.

 

Like most tech demos, some stuff some are hacks and won't make it into Unity releases and some stay as GitHub separate downloads. I would not be surprised they use meshes for terrain
Many skilled devs can make visual plugins, but the most important is Unity to get a proper tiled terrain system, it's needed for streaming and open worlds editing.

 

Some hack did made it into full implementation like timeline, it goes both way, I'm just saying they are unrolling the prerequisite I still have to see how they handle streaming though, there is not even tech demo about it, but I guess it's dependent on the job system.

 

Just a heads up, lately we've been working on terrain streaming systems and tiled terrains management from large datasets of real-world or custom elevation & imagery data suited for huge open world environments.

 

A lot of people are now attacking the same problem... and without a heads up from Unity about what their intentions and the potential feature set and timeline are its a recipe for significant wasted time and money.

I have a new real time system with Gaia 2 that's driven by GPU compute as well... its lovely and fast... but without understanding where Unity is going with this I am concerned that it is just a big waste of my time.

 

Unity new features work are not driven by plugins availability( cinemachine or the new visual shader editor).
Like Probuilder, i think Unity should really consider hiring a talented guy like you

 

https://forum.unity.com/threads/fee...e-render-pipelines.470095/page-9#post-3418511

 

I will believe when i see it

 

woo!

 

I wonder if it would be technically feasible to use Sparse-Textures for terrains. For examle as Splat or Hightmap.

 

https://twitter.com/willgoldstone/status/976138103009128453

 

around -1:53:00 he explain terrain update

 

There is only nested prefabs and scene fragments lol
No new terrain announced.

 

Uh yeah sorry that video was live and the time are changing , it's on the front just after the probuilder topic
should be around -2:16:00 if it's not changing again :/

 

"Terrain - In this worldbuilding context our terrain system has been a little neglected. Very pleased to annouce this is the year it gets it's major update. One of the first things we did was look at the performance of the terrain. So there are really big performance boosts there. Huge reduction in the number of GC allocations. I think like a doubling of just raw CPU performance. But more importantly we just wanted to focus on the creation. There's a longer roadmap for terrain, this is really just the first major update that we'll be doing in 2018.2. Lots of new brushes and new UX." After that he talks about Polybrush.

 

About creation there is already great tools like Gaia (Gaia 2 ?), Terrain Composer 2 and some others.
I doubt Unity will do better until they bring new terrain procedural tools like those used is open world AAA games

I was not satisfied with plugins like CTS or MicroSplat about noticeable performance drop. I don't know , but perhaps some plugins like CTS, MegaSplat, RTP3 will get updates that will benefit from the new terrain improvments ?
Or perhaps Unity will bring new terrain advanced shaders and will also get rid of the actual terrain limitations for desktop games ?

 

Pretty sure it'll involve quantum or something. Can't wait til 2018.2 to find out.

 

Did they delete the whole roadmap talk from the stream!?

Uh, no, google cached last 4 hours so we should wait for stream to stop to actually re-watch the stream.

 

yep it's gone, just like the other unity central videos

 

What the hell, Unity? Give us that talk, oh my got!

That was more important than your whole Keynote talk, and you've deleted that?!

 

yeah, the first part of that video are pretty good talk actually. It about their roadmap for 2018 cycle

 

Yeah it's just that Unity decided to move all that to April 1st 2019.

 

what? April 1, ?? 2019? this is a joke? this is a day of laughter .... I hope you kidding and we will see changes have this year. or it is accurate information, then this is bad.

 

See the whole talk for yourself. They uploaded it.

 

yeah, if moved to 2019 it sounds like dead before arrival. Just another year delay on top of the many years already.

 

It was just a joke, nothing has been moved to April 1st 2019.

The main thing I would note about 2018.2 Terrain improvements is that this isnt everything they have planned for terrain, its phase 1 of the new system. Especially on the editor tools side of things, it sounds like they have more planned for the future.

 

Cross terrain painting is an important feature, it looks like Unity will get tiled terrain editing and support ( something UE4 had from the start ) ?

 

They quickly mentioned in the video that there will be some performance improvements coming along as well?
That's the main thing I'm concerned about.
You can not load a scene asynchronously without a major stutter. It does that when it generates the mesh for from the heightmap. That should be pretty easy to fix though.

 

I hope, when improving the terrain engine, they finally improve the triangulation aswell (https://feedback.unity3d.com/suggestions/terrain--better-triangulation).

 

Unreal Engine 2003/4 allowed custom painting of the edge directions.

 

2018.2 is on beta4 and i see no terrain improvements. what was planned for .2?

 

This is from the roadmap talk. This is what planned for 2018.2 in terms of "World Building". They said it will be the first major terrain update (so we should get more updates after that).

 

Unity Team le classique. Let's wait for another year.

 

Who needs a new terrain system? Today I created a beautiful terrain in Unity. Yes it in no part used the built in system to make it and was quite expensive and can not be shared with my customers but it is a perfectly fine like this sentence is grammatically corect,

 

Check out this guy's work: https://forum.unity.com/threads/new-terrain-system.384532/ It looks like a very promising alternative (the demo works quite well) and i think he deserves some publicity.