[RELEASED] SECTR COMPLETE: Spaces, and the Connections Between Them

So accidental delete of a chuck when replaced it with back up can import but export button greyed out get this error.

Exported data does not match scene. Skipping import of SECTR Nor2_x9_y7 3-2-0 Sector.
UnityEngine.Debug:LogError(Object)
SECTR_StreamExport:ImportFromChunk(SECTR_Sector) (at Assets/SECTR/Code/Stream/Editor/SECTR_StreamExport.cs:55)
SECTR_ChunkEditor:ExportUpdate() (at Assets/SECTR/Code/Stream/Editor/SECTR_ChunkEditor.cs:163)
UnityEditor.EditorApplication:Internal_CallUpdateFunctions()

 

Hi. This is an internal unity mse error. That system is still pretty fragile. Probably the best solution is to recreate the sector and then export it fresh.

 

Hi there, been looking through the SECTR forums and found several times where you mentioned SECTR ought to work with existing networking solutions, which is great! I also saw you mentioned back in 2014 that you might consider integration with networking solutions (or something to that effect like spinning something up to make it easier to set up).
I am wondering that still on the horizon? If so what will it look like? I am asking because I don't want to go too far spinning up my own solution and extending stuff if you're already working on something.

Great set of products, thank you!
Boysenberry Payne

 

i'm doing some audio tests with SECTR Audio and noticing a bug. I followed the quick start guide and added a point source into my scene with a wind sound. When I run the scene, the sound plays fine. However, when I hit stop, the sound continues to play in the editor. I have to click on the Stop button on the point source component for it to stop playing. With only one point source in the scene it isn't too bad to stop it, but if I had a lot more it could be very tedious. Is there a way to get the point sources to stop properly when I stop the game?

EDIT: I also noticed that when I open the SimpleAudio demo that all the sound sources were already playing before even pressing play. And after I stopped the scene I had to go and stop each individual sound source manually.

 

Everything was right, now to go through the portal with my perssonagem the unity lock , I'm using Stream

 

Hi. Sorry for the slow reply. No news on this front except to say that while I don't plan to include a network integration, I'm not aware of anyone who has had issues getting SECTR to play nice with networking.

 

Hi. This is actually by design so that you can hear your audio in the editor. If you don't want to hear the audio, just press the little mute button above the unity viewport.

 

Hi!

I have a quick and maybe dumb question: when I do the Build which scen have I to add to perform the Streaming?
The current active one is sufficient or have I to add the chunks?
Thanks in advance,

Dom

 

You don't need to add any scenes at all. SECTR adds them for you automatically.

 

I have a question about editing scenes...

For example if I put a terrain composed of 16 tiles into a scene, i divide the terrain with sectr and now i have 16 scenes...

- how can i manage directional light to be the same with all scenes (do i have to add one for each scene - because i only neeed one)

- what about all the settings of the scene? Would i have to edit them in all scenes (for example skybox, ambient ligth etc..)

- how is it compatible with rtp? If i "apply" rtp beofre spliting into multiple scemes it wont work because rtp works when you drop its component into hierarchy, but then again setfing up rtp for every scene seems unecessary and not quite beneficial for performance


I ask because that large terrain can easily run when build (as it loads only chunks nearby) but to edit it as a omce sceme i would need monster computer.

Basically how would the workflow look like with sperating into multiple scenes.

Thanks

 

Hi Guys

I love SECTR.
But after updating to unity 5.3.4 1f

I get this error every time I export my SECTR's from the streaming window.

Asset with GUID 6aa43e185b6930d4088868dbc9a67db0 has empty path but has assettimestamp???
UnityEditor.AssetDatabase:Refresh()
SECTR_StreamExport:_ShowBackupPrompt() (at Assets/SECTR/Code/Stream/Editor/SECTR_StreamExport.cs:812)
SECTR_StreamExport:ImportSceneChunksUI() (at Assets/SECTR/Code/Stream/Editor/SECTR_StreamExport.cs:701)
SECTR_StreamWindow:OnGUI() (at Assets/SECTR/Code/Stream/Editor/SECTR_StreamWindow.cs:144)
UnityEditor.DockArea:OnGUI()

I tried re-import all assets that didn't help.

Thanks in advance
/Bo

 

Hi. Good questions.

In SECTR, when you divide you scene into 16 tiles and export, you have 16 sub-scenes (one for each tile) and one master scene, so you have 17 total. The master scene is the most important of all, and the key to your questions.

All global game objects (like your directional light) should be in the master scene. The same is true for the global settings like ambient light.

For RTP, the best is to use Terrain Composer + RTP to setup the grid of terrains. The use Sector's Terrain Window (which understands Terrain Composer) to make Sectors of the terrain grid. From there, export, etc.

 

Hi, Bo. Glad you like SECTR. Do you get this error when you export Sectors in the Demo Stream scenes? If not, what is the full path to one of your scene files that has this error?

 

It doesn't happen when I export in the OpenWorld scene

The path is Assets\_Scenes\Templates\TerrainTemplate
The file is in Assets\_Scenes\Templates

 

Also happens on Import

 

I think I fixed, did a reimport of everything and deleted the back_up fil, that seams to have fixed it.

 

Ok. Great to hear. I was just about to write and say I had no idea why it was breaking

 

Good Morning,

I've bought Sectr Complete some months ago and I can say i love it.
I currently have a small issue concerning the use of Sectr STREAM on large open areas.
Here is the situation :

I have some building / Objects quite complex (each of them has 70-ish Draw calls contribution) that I would like
to Stream. Each of them has a Sector and the process works, but I get very sensible hiccups (both in Personal and Pro version).
Am I doing something wrong? are these Objects too complex to be managed efficiently? If yes, which is a average limit of "weight" that a sector should have?

Thanks in advance for your answer,

Dom

 

Hey! Glad you're liking SECTR! First of, try profiling in a build, not in editor. Actual performance doesn't change between pro and personal (in unity 5) but does between editor and standalone. If performance is still an issue, the most likely culprit is scripts that do a lot of work in Start our OnEnable.

 

Thanks for the fast answer!
I forgot to mention two things:
1) i don't use portals but just the sectors and one loader (Region one).
2)In the build I still can see hiccups

could you please tell me what does mean culprit? (I am not a native english speaker, sorry)

Do you think the 1st reason could be the problem?

Dom

 

In its basic use, culprit means one is guilty (from the Latin root "culpa"). In computers, it is often used to mean the thing which causes a problem.

 

does sectr streaming also save occlusion culling if we bake it ?

 

Not using portals is fine. If you are seeing hitches in the full build you'll need to use the profiler to see what code is taking so much time when a new section loads. Most likely you have scripts that do a lot of work in OnEnable or Start and all of that code runs when the chunk is loaded.

 

SECTR had its own occlusion system. The built in culling from unity is not compatible with streaming.

 

Quick question. I'm about to start a project that will have a huge open world map (much like the original final fantasy) I'm wondering what is the best way to do this with Sectr? Create the entire map, and split it up, or create multiple terrains and 0 out the terrain where they meet? What size should i be making the terrain? There was not much about connecting terrains in the doc's. Thank you for your time

 

I recommend you start by using terrain composer to create a multi terrain world then use the SECTR terrain told to create sectors for it. Terrain grid size totally depends on your content, but I usually recommend 0.5km or 1km squares.

 

thanks, i have sectr full, Instantoc, but i already started to setup unity LOD system, considering a large open map mobile project what would be the most efficient system for lod and culling ?

 

I'm taking the same approach but with Gaia. I created one huge tile and stamped it with a basic stamp to give some contour and then I'm using Sectr to split it into smaller sections. I was leaning towards 1k tiles but may go as low as .5k. Have still been kind of up in the air about that.

 

I have Gaia as well.. May i ask how big of a terrain you tried? I am curious just to get an idea if there are any limitations, and what my workflow is going to be.

I already have 2 large 3k maps made with Gaia and normal scene stuff in them. Can i add them to an existing sectr master map as a sub-map/terrain and have it behave like any of the other split terrain's? Or is it something that makes more sense to bite the bullet and start over.

Sorry for the noob questions, Just got this Asset and am trying to figure it out.

 

I'm doing a tutorial on it.. Link is in my signature. The terrain I started with was 32k x 32k. I probably would have never gone that high but people were asking questions with those numbers. A lot of people are waiting for multi-tile support in Gaia. But that is what is awesome about Sectr. If you start with a huge tile and slice it down for streaming, you don't need to wait.

As soon as I can wrap my head around things enough to get caught up on stuff, the next part of the tutorial will be slicing and then stamping individual slices. Health issues kinda knocked me off my feet this week. The tutorial is a written tutorial and even though it is free, the stuff I'm using on the website to post tutorials requires you to "buy" it for free. Need to dig into that.

@MakeCodeNow, I kind of have an overview of what I'm planning to do in the tutorial. If there are any Sectr specific things you think should be done in the process of slicing up a huge terrain in to smaller streamed open-world type setup, throw me a PM and I'll try to figure out how to include it.

Also, even though I'm doing the tutorial with Gaia.. There is nothing to say that there might not be useful information there for non-Gaia users either - or see it being done in Gaia and use what you learn to apply it to what you are doing in whatever other terrain system you use.

 

Instant OC and SECTR should play pretty nicely with one another. If you use Instant OC, don't use SECTR VIS features as you'll just slow yourself down. I haven't benchmarked VIS vs Instant OC in a while, but SECTR is generally faster and more accurate, because it doesn't rely on a stochastic sampling of the entire scene. YMMV.

 

Shawn, thank you very much for creating the tutorial. This is what makes the Unity community awesome! I don't know much about Gaia, but if you want to talk about more cool SECTR stuff, I think adding something about LODs and about how to use Stream Proxies would be very popular.

 

I've kind of hit a temporary wall with it due to some issues with my hardware. I'm probably going to scale back the world that I'm working with in the tutorial and re-approach it either this coming week or the next. If you are up for maybe a skype chat to discuss the LODs and stream proxy stuff, that definitely sounds like it would be useful. Just throw me a PM or email and we can set something up. My Sectr understanding is still pretty basic in the grand scope of things. But understand it enough to know that it is a totally viable option for creating a multi-tile world even before Gaia is updated to officially support multi-tile.

 

Hello guys,

I'm going to start working on a project that will contain an "outside" part and an "inside" part.
I'm looking in a way to improve the performance on how the stuff load into the scene. The project should be for VR (of course ) and it will mainly be a camera walking on a path, so everything will be scripted.

Is Sectr still being updated? Does it work with Unity 5.3 (what about 5.4?)?

Our outside will probably be a terrain generated with Gaia.
Our inside will be hand made models. We will have different rooms with different objects in those rooms.

Will it be possible to disable the outside once we are inside? Is the playmaker support up to date? I will basically do various interaction & triggers using Playmaker.

Thank You

 

SECTR is still being updated. I can't tell you how it works in 5.4, because I'm using 5.3, but I can shed some light on 5.3.

Several Unity releases ago (5.2.x if I recall), I found a Unity-crashing bug if the scene was statically lightmapped. Whenever SECTR Stream would try to unload a sector with a lightmap, Unity would crash, but the bug was intermittent for most people. I was the lucky guy who could reproduce it reliably. The SECTR team and I worked together to determine that it was actually a Unity bug that could affect any C# script that unloaded a lightmap. After sending the crash report and waiting a few weeks, Unity Tech Support wrote back that they had confirmed it was a Unity bug and not a SECTR bug, and they promised to fix it but didn't set a date.

With the current version of Unity 5.3.x, I am no longer seeing the bug. Officially from Unity, however, their bug is fixed in 5.4. I don't know why the bug went away before the official fixed Unity version, but it has, at least for me, and SECTR Stream is now stable on my system.

All of this bodes pretty well for you using SECTR under 5.4. I want to reiterate that this was a Unity bug and not the fault of SECTR, and both Unity and SECTR were quite cooperative in fixing it once we could reliably reproduce it and get consistent crash reports. I was particularly pleased that the SECTR folks didn't try to blame my code for the bug even though they personally could not reproduce it in their lab. They accepted my report and worked with me to solve it.

Absolutely. In fact, SECTR ships with a demo scene that does exactly that, enabling a truly seamless transition from inside a futuristic corridor complex to an exterior polar landscape.

The boundary isn't an inside/outside thing, but rather more nuanced. All the sectors where the player can't see are switched off. If you are outside but standing near the open hatchway, one interior sector is enabled so you can see inside, and vice-versa.

SECTR will also let you split your large interiors and disable non-visible parts of those.

One caveat is that SECTR overlaps functionality with Unity's own pre-baked occlusion culling. Check the SECTR docs for details, but basically you want to use one or the other in a scene and not both. You can, however, use SECTR in some of your scenes and Unity occlusion culling in other scenes; just don't mix them in one scene.

If your interior models are handmade, you will want to make sure the meshes are reasonably sized (that is, don't do a whole level as one gigantic mesh). That is good Unity design practice anyway, whether or not you use SECTR. Room-sized meshes are fine with SECTR, but don't do a gigantic castle as one enormous mesh.

I can't comment on Playmaker because I don't use it. You may be pleasantly surprised how little coding you actually need to do. SECTR has built-in trigger behaviors that do most of the heavy lifting for you. But the APIs and source code are there if you need them.

What terrain editor you use is basically irrelevant to SECTR, as long as you're using standard Unity terrain objects at the end of the process.

 

Syscrusher is spot on. Couldn't have said it better myself

Regarding Unity 5.4, I'm not aware of any bugs but I haven't done extensive testing myself. In general, SECTR has the same expectation as regular Unity - a beta is a beta, not a solid release, so if you use a beta, expect to see some bugs.

 

Thanks. We just got the script. I opened the demo scene, the one with the sliding doors... and the coridors, etc.

I want to do a test using our camera movement script. Basically I have a "Player Script" that has a Main Camera set up as child. I have a Path... where I put some Path Nodes... so basically I use the nodes to draw splines... and the Player will move on those splines.

What are the require scripts that I have to put on my player & my camera so the whole Streaming & Culling stuff will work?

Thank You

P.S. I tried moving some components one by one but I get no culling, everything get's loaded. I also think that the doors open when the Player (which has a box colider) colides with the doors... I don't have a colider on my player... but that's not an issue for now.

 

I suggest you go through the included quick start docs or watch the videos. They explain how to set all of this stuff up, at least in a basic way.

 

Heya! Is there an easy way to change the loading doors to only start the loading/opening process when the player enters the trigger and presses a key? Right now, my solution to doing this is really hack-y and involves moving the trigger collider around.

 

Sure. The source for the door is provided as part of SECTR. Should be easy to add an additional input check to the opening and closing logic.

 

I have first person PC game with open environments. Naturally I want to use Lod to cull distant objects. The problem I have is that I'm not sure when it's appropriate to use it and when it isn't. I mean, how many tris should model have to justify Lod component considering that Lod component has an overhead? Where is that threshold? Should I use it if object is simple, but uses transparent material?

 

Good question. The only real answer is that you have to profile. In general, you want lods that are at least 50% vertex count and ideally 50% batch count.

 

@Gua,

Make sure you understand the difference between LOD and culling.

LOD provides a reduced-quality visual replacement for game objects that are distant from the camera, to reduce the CPU and GPU resources to render the objects.

Culling is a method for determining which objects are not visible to the camera, usually because they are outside the frustum of its view or because their size and distance from the camera make them too small to be worth rendering.

LOD objects are rendered but trade off quality for performance (usually in a way that is practically invisible to the player). Culled objects are not rendered at all.

 

@syscrusher
I understand the difference. If my tests are correct, culling using Lod Group actually has almost no overhead.

Here's a video where I compare results of LayerCulling and Culling using Lod Group. To my surprise, it seems that culling using Load Group performs even better that LayerCulling and it seems that it makes sense to use it even on small low poly objects like rocks.

Here some stats:
LayerCulling: 0.3 ms (around 3000 fps)
Lod Group Culling: 0.2 ms (around 4000 fps)
No Culling (1000 static cubes, no shadow casting, don't receive shadows): 1.4 ms ( around 650 fps)

Are my conclusions correct?

 

Neither of the scripts you're using are from SECTR so this isn't really the right forum to discuss them, but my guess is that what you're seeing is that unity's native LOD component is faster than the layer culling script.

 

@Gua, In general I'll take the [entirely appropriate] hint from @MakeCodeNow and not perpetuate the topic, but I wanted to say that I didn't realize you were talking about LOD group culling and not occlusion or SECTR Vis culling. Re-reading your question now, it makes perfect sense. Thanks for clarifying.

 

@MakeCodeNow, @Gua thanks for those answers. I still can believe that Lod Group has such a low overhead. I'm sorry for hijacking the topic.

 

I have a question... maybe you guys can give me a solution.

I have a pretty big terrain with various elements & props & an building with an interior, props, characters, etc.

Basically the way I see it I have 2 sectors. I even have a tunnel with a door that will allow me to load/unload the exterior/interior.

The problem is that the building has some big windows that basically sees the terrain. How would you suggest to do this. If I unload the terrain... it woun't be able to be viewed from inside the building. I was thinking on taking some screenshots and creating some quads with those screenshots as a texture to simulate the outside but it seems weird.

Do you have any suggestions for this? or I could just not unload the terrain and that's it.

Thank You


EDIT:

well, this whole thing is getting a bit to complex.

That's my entrance. When I get near it a door will open, you get inside the corridor door closes... and after that the other interior door will open but before it I want to load the interior of the building, and unload the exterior objects (I might leave the terrain).

Because of the shape of the whole building & the entrance I'm not sure how to make the sectors.

I was thinking a sector with the outside props, a sector with the corridor and a sector with the inside objects.



I also need to make a sector on the left/right of this sector and they might overlap...

 

Billboards like that are actually a very common technique.

"Airlocks" like this are very common, too. They'll often turn a corner so you can only see one end at a time.

 

Hello there,

back to my above project. I really think it's getting to heavy and we might have to use Sectr.
The problem is that I don't know how exactly...

Basically I have a big terrain with a building in the middle of it. That building is full of stuff and I want to keep then uploaded and only load the interior when I get into a corridor.



The sceen looks something like this.

Yellow = Terrain with varrious other props
Blue = A corridor that has some airlocks. You don't see outisde or inside. I might not use your Airlock script because it get's to complicated
Magenta = The actual interior of the building full of meshes, characters with animations, sounds, etc.


I'm not really sure how to draw the sectors and the portals :|