[Official] New Terrain System

Never worked with Frostbite but Cryengine terrain system is basically what I want. That combined with Unitys' prefab and material workflow will be the best thing ever. So that is all I will put for my request.

Cryengine terrain system with a good shader. The tree and plant placement tools are the most important to me. Also have the tree and plant placement features work with any tree or plant prefab not only speedtrees.

 

Who are you?
I'm a game developer having worked on terrain systems professionally for two flight simulator projects in the past.

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
Without saying too much, it's a first person 'exploration' game that takes place in a lush outdoor environment.

How does terrain fit into that?
We have been waiting to see what Unity 5 would bring to the table in terms of PBR and have been contemplating on whether to use the Relief Terrain Pack asset or implementing our own custom terrain system using the new PBR solution in Unity 5.

What use-cases, features, workflows do you have or would like to see?
First and foremost, we would like to be able to use height maps for blending textures. Secondly, we require PBR because we want to simulate different times of day and weather using the same scene and materials. Thirdly, we want detail textures.

I personally don't care about holes. I don't see to many of those in the real world anyway....

So:

+1 Heightmap texture blending
+1 Detail textures

 

How about some way to adjust overall terrain light levels or gamma? I often find that the terrain ground texture lighting looks blown out compared to everything else in the scene, especially after baking. I usually fix this by adjusting the gamma of my lightmaps, but wouldn't it be easier to just add a gamma slider to the terrain shader so this can be fine tuned right in the editor?

 

Really need PBR terrain. When the standard shader hits with Unity 5, everyone is going to be pulling their hair out trying to figure out how to get all the awesome looking PBR shaders and global illumination to look right with a nasty looking default terrain that doesn't even support normal mapping out of the box. I am aware of RTP3, I have it, but its desktop only, etc, ....

built-in support for importing splatmaps. I know it's doable thru scripting but I don't want to have to go find that random splatmap importer script every time.

Importing multiple terrain tiles. I am aware of stuff like TerrainComposer for importing heightmaps and splatmaps for multiple terrain tiles, but again, the interface is absolutely convoluted. It's a pattern with terrain assets.

Streaming multiple terrain tiles. I want to be able to build a huuge terrain and not have to deal with streaming terrain tiles and keeping everything at the origin to prevent floating point precision issues.

Global Color Map
Global Normal Map
Detail Textures
Tree / Grass / Detail placement with image masks
Road / Terrain Spline tool (UE4, easyroad asset, road architect asset)


Workflow currently goes like this:

• Use world machine to make a presentable, realistic looking set (multiple tiles) of heightmaps, splatmaps, global color and normal maps
• Spend $100 on an asset just to import the terrain tiles, otherwise it could take day(s) to import 8x8 terrain tiles, splatmaps, etc. Takes a week to figure out wtf is going on with the ridiculous user interface.
• Spend $100 on an asset just to get decent shaders for the terrain. Takes like a week to figure out the user interface for the asset. Said asset's author is currently contemplating ditching the asset store...
• Then, you have to modify the terrain, like add roads, level areas out, retexture stuff, etc. Kind of a disconnect after that, and you have to export the terrain back to world machine, then regenerate the global color map, normal map, splat textures, bust out the ridiculous assets again and get a big headache importing everything again... and then rinse repeat

TLDR:

• Make it look amazing
• Make it look AAA-mazing.
• Make the workflow easier / less hurdles / better in-editor tooling. Reduce the need for so many third party assets and programs. It would be incredible if I could do everything in Unity. I'm fine with world machine + unity. Just not world machine + unity + random scripts to import data + terrain composer to import + RTP to make it look good + skyshop cuz RTP doesnt work on mobile + ......

 

Apologies for the small hijack, but "not well supported or updated"?

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/easyroads3d-v3-the-upcoming-new-road-system.229327/

As for the new terrain system, direct support for holes mentioned in the unite video would be a very nice new feature

Raoul

 

Who are you?
My name is Alan Stagner. I'm the founder and owner of MoPho' Games, a very small independant game studio using the Unity game engine.

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
We're building a free-to-play multiplayer FPS called Orbital Assault.

How does terrain fit into that?
Orbital Assault blends the physics of Quake, the style and (some) gameplay mechanics of Halo, and the large open environments of Battlefield.
Terrain is a big deal when you're working with large open environments, as you can imagine.

What use-cases, features, workflows do you have or would like to see?
Really, I just need the terrain engine to not suck. Heightmap-based terrain is fine (although being able to sculpt overhangs into the terrain would be amazing, like how I think it was Halo Wars where they stored an X Y Z vertex offset instead of just a heightmap). I want the terrain engine to offer proper integration with the new PBR rendering in Unity 5. I want heightmap-based blending. I also want the DX11 tessellation bug to be fixed (if you use a particular form of vertex shader, it completely breaks DX11 tessellation), and for the terrain to support tessellation by default.
CryEngine-style cave support would be amazing.
Support for colliders on detail meshes as well as trees (and, for the love of god, please allow more collider types than just capsules).

Finally, while not necessary for Orbital Assault, I'd like built-in support for open world streaming of terrains. This is one part of the current terrain engine that is a huge issue, it just doesn't properly support the kind of streaming necessary for large open worlds. You either have to split your terrain into smaller chunks (which seriously degrades performance, because apparently terrains have horribly inefficient culling), or use larger chunks and suffer loading spikes.

 

I think my previous post could potentially be misinterpreted. By heightmap I was referring to actual texture heightmaps, not terrain heightmaps.

For example, I would like to be able have something like this:



...blend into something like this:



Would be super cool!

 

Another big wish of mine:
Please fix how the heightmap byte order differs from that of the splatmap... actually I might have it wrong in my mind BUT:
it totally sucks to always have to FLIP heightmaps vertically while some other maps don't have to be flipped... especially when working with worldmachine and multiple global terrain maps (color, splat, normal, height) supported by third party plugins - it so sucks to always remember flipping map x for reason y. That's just so GNAARGH.... in terms of workflow.
Make them all orient the same way. Make it understandable, intuitive - make it work with worldmachine, the defacto standart.

 

actually Im hobbiyst working on assets for asset store. I agree with most previous guys features request so i dont repeat this but there is probably one thing worth to add:

- please dont repeat fail like with shuriken where access to parameters is very hard and limited... and move as much as possible to open source land (even with editor side like new UI) considering performance gain for native code before ofc (however u have IL2CPP so maybe this is good to consider move as much as possible to c# and use IL2CPP on plugin alone before build...) this apply to future shuriken upgrade as well....

 

Voxelize that and add possibility of infinite terrain. That's all I can say.

 

Who are you?
Game developer

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
1: Finished a tactical ballistics simulator
2: Working on a RTS game. Since unity 2.5

How does terrain fit into that?
Terrain is import in a RTS game both for tactical as well as visual reasons.

What use-cases, features, workflows do you have or would like to see?
•We currently use the terrainData.GetAlphamaps() to determine what type of terrain a path finding node represents in our in-house pathfinder.
•Roads and rivers would be nice. Roads would need a better way to control the splatmap placement.
•Erosion control of the terrains would also be nice.
•Right now trees that are part of the terrain cannot have scripts. Which causes problems both for knocking over trees and for hit box generated particle effects.
•The current terrain is ugly.

 

Oh i forgot this one,
Please add a tool to bake per vertex terrain Ambient Occlusion that take AO from terrain and trees. Not sure if this gonna work for speedtree trees... but it could be awesome if we can have it.
For example, if you have a plain grass land and a forest nearby, all the ground, trees, and foliage under the forest should be darker.

 

Now for the "elephant in the room"... When will we see the new terrain system? Will it be in a forthcoming Unity 5.0 beta?

 

No, I suspect it's going to be something for Unity 6 or very late in 5. This is just to see what we (users) want.

edit: see bibs official reply below

 

We're working on it. No timeframe for which version or when it will show up. But we will post updates when we have something to share.

 

Cool. Looking forward to any updates.

One thing I would love to see in 5.0 is a shader that resembles the Standard Shader for the terrain. I know the source for the Standard Shader will be out so we can make our own versions but I am not a shader coder. It would be amazingly helpful to have one built-in.

 

We will provide built-in shaders that work with the current terrain system in Unity 5. So you're covered

 

Thanks man. That is great to know.

 

Who are you?
Small Development Studio

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
Large, Open World Fantasy RPG

How does terrain fit into that?
22 Mile Terrain (already complete), majority of external detail

What use-cases, features, workflows do you have or would like to see?
Support for painting materials onto terrain, like the water material to create puddles.
Cutting holes in terrain.
Vertex painting support for regular meshes, to help with blending into terrain (more of a materials or new feature than a terrain thing).

We are currently using Unity 4 Pro with 5 Pro pre-ordered and waiting for release (is there an ETA on 5 yet?).

 

Who are you?
Single developer

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
Realistic 3rd Person Shooter

How does terrain fit into that?
?

What use-cases, features, workflows do you have or would like to see?
I am voting for performance.
This not very realistic scene (only 1k textures) runs only at around 80 fps on my really good computer (unlike Unity's Viking Village which runs at around 300 fps on my computer). So on a user's computer, it will surely be too slow.
Tweaking the terrain parameters does not help much.


Hmmm, perhaps I have misunderstood the original question, and this thread is only about terrain editing tools and not about batch processing and thus about the terrain engine core... ?

 

That looks really nice, and its only at 1.4m tris! I guess this could be about anything, I'd also second this, optimizations for performance would be greatly appreciated.

 

Who are you?
Indie dreamer, coder, physics fetishist.

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
Right now, a game revolving around destruction, and physics to a great degree

How does terrain fit into that?
It forms the foundation of my levels and provides a surface for stuff to fall onto, as well as a substrate to be excavated by forces

What use-cases, features, workflows do you have or would like to see?
I would first like to see some tools focused on excavation and modification. For example, the ability to increase the resolution of sub-areas of the terrain mesh to sculpt out craters and the like dynamically.

Id like to see more control over the terrain collision shape, and especially to make it much simpler than the actual terrain mesh.

I'd also like to see some special features focused on substrates. Snow, sand, loose dirt, etc. Some means of objects embedding into these surfaces, leaving footprints/imprints/tyre tracks, etc.

And finally, i'd like to see some kind of randomised mixing feature with terrain textures. Rotate and blend them a bit rather than just tiling them flatly, so it doesn't just look artificial from far away.

 

Oh i forgot this one for terrain system.
A Unified detail and vegetation system/Tool
it would be cool if we can paint detail objects, vegetation in non terrain while still having the same optimization, LOD, and vegetation animation from terrain system.

 

I still think puddles and other custom materials painting would be very popular.
Is there any chance of vertex painting materials directly onto models in Unity 5?

 

That would be better to do it via terrain decals system. Some kind of splat/stamp/projecting a material into the terrain.
imo

 

Performance, performance, performance.

Secondary stuff that help performance: better billboards + shadows like turboforest (https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/26354).

 

Who are you?
I'm an Australian solo developer currently working on Down To One, a competitive survival game in a large, open-world environment.

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
A competitive survival game in a large, open-world environment.

How does terrain fit into that?
Our terrain is 2x2km, and a huge part of our game, in terms of gameplay, visuals, and performance. I can safely say that the worst part of development so far has been working with the Unity terrain engine, which is barely usable for our game as it stands. Trees in linear lighting don't work, billboarded trees at night don't work, there's the bug linked in my signature that costs 4ms/frame, editing a terrain is very clunky, editing trees on a terrain to test out different shaders is clunky/time wasting, and for any serious work you need addons, terrain performance is poorly documented, etc. etc.


What use-cases, features, workflows do you have or would like to see?
-Ability to shape terrains properly, with a first-party terrain editor
-Different built-in terrain shaders for different levels of quality.
-More of the terrain system code exposed, so when critical bugs like the one in my signature happen for half of an entire release cycle, we can fix them ourselves

 

Great Job on your project @GoGoGadget. It is amazing.

Are you talking about the max mesh tree setting? It doing nothing? Would be a nice thing to have fixed while we wait for the new terrain system.

 

Thanks!
Haven't heard anywhere that it's related to the max mesh tree setting, but basically, every time the camera rotates, Unity seems to rebuild/rebake every billboard tree in the scene, at a very high performance cost. For us, it's essentially a permanent 4ms performance drop. Tweeted to one of Unity's main QA guys about it, he said they'd tried fixing it, but had made it worse ><

 

I wish they'd just get a move on, start with a blank sheet (and remember that we all have multiple cores now). Top priority after 5 launch. Punch It!

 

They probably are separate bugs which just makes it worse. Guess the new system will have to be the fix.

I really do hope they are starting from fresh. Want a nice new shiny system without any old buggy code in it. Since Unity 5 is 5-6 months late I am really hoping we will see the new terrain system by 5.2 or 5.3.

 

Forgot to mention this earlier, but on my terrain, which is 22.3 miles roughly, I have had severe UV shifting problems where whenever the camera is moving, the UV's on the terrain vibrate, this is VERY noticeable. I already have a shifting origin to prevent the character from vibrating in this manner but this still happens on the terrain, is there any way to fix this? or is this something fixed in U5?

The terrain can be seen here:
http://kylebriggs.co.uk/portfolio/Project-Iron/

 

@ Labyrith Studios: Based on the size of your scene, it sounds like it might be due to camera clip settings - the ratio between the max and min clip ranges. If it's too large, you get pixel fighting on everything, which means anything that overlaps anything else appears to jump around a bit. The only fix, when using a very large playing area, is either to reduce your max clip distance, and use fog to mask the distance cutoff, or increase your min clip distance. The goal is to get the max/min ratio low enough to avoid the problem in most views, but it's always a bit of a balancing act when you're using large open scenes. Another possible complication is if you use certain image effects, like SSAO, that really need to come with a depth cutoff setting to avoid problems in large scenes.

 

Shameless plug: I just released an editor extension on the asset store that enables pressure sensitive painting of terrain, http://u3d.as/bK7 -- I don't want to hijack this thread so if you have any questions please ask them in this other thread.

 

Who are you?
Indie Game Developer working with a small team of 5


What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
We are creating a survival game.

How does terrain fit into that?
To simply put, our first iteration of the game was a game where the scenery was constantly changing, it had 3 fungie constantly fighting to eat each other so we had plants devouring other plants and spreading their "disease" around them, changing terrain textures, grass and plants dynamically, we DROPPED this concept after months of development because it was killing performance, we tried optimizing it with a few different techniques but the result was always the same. Accessing trees, grass, textures and changing them was insane in some cases.

We then decided to do a traditional terrain but we wanted to dig it out, voxels was an option but all the solutions we tried from the store weren't performant enough with multple other issues.

Collision with terrain was also a problem since there's no easy way to make something react to the terrain when the normals are interpolated and only calculated on edges, I actually attended a Unity tech guy talk where he talked about unity 5 as asked him about it, he was oblivious to the problem. We later gave up on caves for similar reasons.

We also them gave up the idea of a procedural terrain because we need it to have cliffs and overhangs for design purposes and we weren't able to put something that looked good and have the extra features seamlessly with the terrain.

We are now using RTPv3 to render it and it's heavy as hell and we still have problems with the amount of texture that we can use for it, since we have a lot of different biomes we can't blend many of them together in the same terrain and stuff like snow or caustics that RTP brings comes at a cost.


What use-cases, features, workflows do you have or would like to see?
Our current workflow consists of using world machine and if it weren't for RTP it would be a pain to get something out of WM that looked good without global maps, detail maps or even random noise maps.

The worst thing about it now is performance and reliability so if could pick, a better management of very large scale terrains (or multiple sliced ones) should be a priority. Proper LODs and grass rendering as well as texture blending, the texture sample cap is just too low.

Also far shadows onto terrain and distant objects like trees should be considered because while not a terrain feature it kill the illusion of a proper infinite terrain.

Our game came from this great dynamic idea, then we got a slap on the face from unity engine and we completely changed directions into which is now a very different game were the focus isn't the environment anymore.

 

Who are you?
University Teacher at School of Arts.

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
My phd thesis: an open-world game prototype (mmog) where you navigate through an ice surface (surface == terrain) using sound cues and dig through the aforementioned ice in order to get close to its source, an antenna array. At these antennas you can pick objects that represent the culture of the civilizations in that planet/zone/region. These objects are defined using a specific Twitter account. Antenna placement is done by a web service. Settlement placement is based on game analytics: most visited places have the most dense settlements. This was phase 1 and It's actually finished. I'm waiting public trails right now.

How does terrain fit into that?
You have to dig through terrain, mainly vertically. "Dynamite" placement changes the height map at runtime.

What use-cases, features, workflows do you have or would like to see?
For phase 2, I would like to have the option of going horizontally - not just holes but also caves. Also, the capability to have several terrains, that I can edit individually. After that I could place the terrain on a Terrain Array that would cycle infinitely on any axis, you know, like a real planet. To place the settlements I would have to be able to get the current active terrain.

EDIT: Do all this using visual/interface tools, of course.

I know that are already some assets and/or scripts that could hypothetically pull this off and I'm looking into them, but hey, you asked!

cheers.
-- jm

 

Who are you?

Independent Developer.

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?

At the moment a colleague and I are working on a casual game for Facebook / web player and for mobile devices (both tablets and smartphones).

How does terrain fit into that?

Terrain does not fit into our current project; however we have other projects that it would be crucial to have the ability for volumetric terrain.

What use-cases, features, workflows do you have or would like to see?

Pretty simple. Raise and lower terrain with a set of pre-made brushes (as well as the ability to make our own) but then also add volumetric features like cutting into the terrain and building out the terrain horizontally not just vertically, to make a cave for example (eg; Tiny Tina's hideout in Borderlands 2) or for a natural land bridge. Also great for underwater caves. And then of course the painting of textures and other assets like trees, rocks, etc...

I'm not sure if the current terrain should be completely replaced with volumetric terrain; I think that it would be great to offer the choice in a scene, to create "simple" terrain or volumetric terrain.

 

Any word on when we can expect the new terrain?

I was under the impression that it would be included with 5. Not that I'm complaining through. My plate is mighty full with cool new toys . I just wouldn't mind having another date to look forward to...

 

I believe Joachim said they had top men working on it. Top men.

 

has the terrain engine changed from 4.6 to 5.0? Anything different? Better?

 

PBR terrain shader, and SpeedTrees. New terrain hopefully soon... http://feedback.unity3d.com/suggestions/improved-unity-terrain-core-engine says it all really.

 

I think smooth voxel (as in not Minecrap or CubeWorld-like, but something more resembling Landmark or current build of Blockscape) terrain should be implemented. Why? Few things, really:

- Easy to make very large or even "infinite" terrains at little performance cost (engine would automatically split them into chunks and stream based on specific GameObject's position)

- Added abilities compared to heightmap-based terrains. Overhangs, floating islands and caves - those are really easy to make with voxels and impossible with heightmap terrain.

 

Height map terrain and voxel terrain is not really the same thing.

I wouldn't mind seeing stuff that's a combination of the two, but I'm pretty sure that's too project specific for Unity's scope.

 

Exactly. But voxel one is much more powerful, precisely because of ability to make things like overhangs or caves, so I wouldn't mind h-map based terrain being replaced by voxel one (and existing terrains could be converted to voxels behind the scenes). Also what happened that we can't rotate or scale terrains anymore?

 

Who are you?
Independent Developer

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
A scientific/space simulation.

How does terrain fit into that?
Before scrawk ported Proland for Unity, i too was in the middle of a port to Unity. Not necessarily to have actual world size coordinates, however to be able to seamlessly go from space to ground in a believable manner. It occurs to me, that a terrain system which could support spherical/curved terrains, would also support flat terrains giving the best of both worlds (excuse the pun).

What use-cases, features, workflows do you have or would like to see?
Example cases might include scientific simulations, training simulations, strategy games, additional realism with the ability to account for curvature of the 'earth' or planet that the terrain is a part of, utility and mapping applications such as google earth etc, visualizing real time airline flights etc

While i have downloaded scrawk's Proland port, i haven't had a chance to delve into the code as of yet, however it strikes me that the solution i'm proposing, while potentially daunting, supports both major cases: flat terrain and curved terrain.

I have tried buying assets and modifying them to provide additional resolution and rendering speed, as well as writing my own, but because of precision and threading limitations (calculating cdlod in scripts just won't cut it, or i just haven't found an acceptable way yet) i'm hoping that you guys will implement something similar as you have access to remove those limitations.

If not, i'll simply have to figure something out with scrawk's Proland port.

if you haven't seen this yet, you need to: http://scrawkblog.com/2014/05/19/proland-to-unity-core/ and watch the video or download the sample.

it solves so many cases that it's not funny. space games/simulations, *truly* huge seamless terrains etc.. implementation could be the ability to create curved 'shells' with the ability to rotate those shells (spherical cube) and be able to seam the shells together, -or- create a shell, and make it flat and use only 1 on the x/z plane.. either case it solves pretty much everything asked for. offer something that hasn't been offered before. shrug. i have faith in you guys

btw, the sample runs in Unity

 

5.0.1. I hope it is coming along well. It would be really awesome if the terrain team could give us updates as it starts coming together. Even if it is just "Hey guys we wrote a line of code today that will eventually allow you to place grass based on a splat texture". That would just make my day.

 

... Unity could just buy out this guy's company and hire him to join the existing terrain team (if there is one)

https://www.youtube.com/user/MrMarchingCubes

 

Actually I'd prefer if they'd bought/hired guy behind VoxelFarm. It's IMO best voxel engine out there now (and because of its versatibility it can take care of level building and terrain at the same time).