[Question] Terrain tools that don't require one license per seat?

Hi, me and a friend are working on a small-medium project, and we have come to the point where we need terrain tools. There are a lot of great tools out there, however for a small hobbyist team that are both newbie programmers with minimum wage jobs, the prices are high. We can't even pool our money together due to the fact most if not all terrain assets/tools I've looked at on the store require one license per seat.

So I am wondering if there are any good tools/assets for terrains on the asset store that DON'T require multiple licenses? We are mainly looking for models like mountain faces, and trees, grass, etc, or hopefully a tool that allows for building of a terrain with these assets.

I would like to learn eventually how to program a tool like this myself eventually but I do not think I'd be up to the task now, or at least not without a guide which I cannot find any of either.

In the end I think the main point is that I'd rather buy an asset/tool that is 100$ by splitting the cost, and being able to have another person come on and use the tool with us in our project later, than having to pay for another person that may or may not even use the tool, just work within our project.

 

Good luck with that - I'm not aware of any terrain tools (good, bad, or otherwise) that offer unlimited number of users per single license. I think most asset developers are also independent artists and developers, also working hard to get by, and can't really afford to do the multi-user per-single-purchase thing.

What you may want to consider, and this will keep you within your budge while getting things started... is to divide the tasks on your project so that only one of you is actually doing the terrain work. That way, one of you can focus on using whatever tool you decide on and the other can focus on characters, structures, lighting, or some other aspect of your project. That's what my partner and I do, it's worked out well for us so far.

 

So is it possible that one person buys a license and uses the tool, and then the other team member doesn't, would either member still be able to build a functional version of the game? For Example, the terrain would still exist in the scene but the tool wouldn't open? Because if that's the case I would have no problem with one person using the tool. The reason why I'd like this to be possible is because we both play test in the editor because it's a lot faster to debug and fix problems that way.

 

It probably depends on the asset and how it works. If the tool in question is used for creating content that can be passed along (or used on the cloud) without having to be installed on the other person's machine, you're good to go... if it is required to be installed on each machine in order to playtest together (that is, you're each using a copy of the asset), then yeah you're probably on the hook for a couple copies. It sounds like this is more of a discussion you and your partner should be having with the developer of the specific asset (or assets) you're looking to use, since there isn't likely a broad answer that applies to all assets.