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

It's compatible with them but it won't create ou load then for your automatically. That's logic that your app would need to provide.

 

I got several questions here for the complete version.

1. How is the performance of chunk scenes loading and unloading on mobile devices, especially when loading and unloading chunks?
2. Does the plugin allow for representing chunks using prefabs rather than scenes, or do you have a plan to support it? Do I have to modify

   SECTR_Chunk

   class to do custom loading like using prefabs?
3. Can I use Sectr to do scene splitting on another dimension, by which I mean to split not only different spatial regions of a scene, but also various layers such as the terrain itself, buildings and decorations?
4. Is it convenient to use Unity built-in terrain system and then convert it to meshes somehow and use the meshes with Sectr Core and especially Stream?
5. Is it possible for more deliberate LOD rather than

   SECTR_LOD

   ?

 

1. It's pretty good. Unity itself is pretty efficient now, so it mostly depends on how much script logic you have that runs in start/awake/enable.

2. No, it's scenes only as they are the only good way to get things like meshes and textures to stream in and out.

3. Yes. Sectors are totally up to you to define.

4. SECTR stream works with terrains. It even includes a tool to split one train into tiles.

5. At this point I would probably just use unity's built in lod. If you don't want that, you can customize SECTR lod as much as you want.

 

Hey, thanks for the quick response. I may need a few more details.

My concern in question 2 is that I read about some big world games complain about frequent loading/unloading operations of additive chunk scenes (They're not using SECTR but the loading/unloading procedures should be quite the same) cause some overhead that can be reduced by using prefabs rather than scenes. I'm wondering if you have any data on this.

I got to clarify question 4. What I want to do is to avoid directly using the built-in terrain system but to convert terrains into meshes before run time. I know SECTR works very well with terrains. It automatically making sectors and streams. But if I do the converting from terrains into plain meshes, do I still have the convenience of automatic sectorization and streaming?

 

If you use prefabs it means you aren't saving any memory and aren't really streaming per se. You're dynamically creating and destroying sections of the world, but it doesn't reduce your resource usage. For some games that might be fine, but most people who use streaming do so because they can't afford to load the whole world in memory at once.

If you did want to use prefabs instead of scenes, it wouldn't be too hard to change SECTR, assuming you are comfortable programming in C#.

If you want to convert meshes to terrains, you'll need to do that yourself as SECTR doesn't provide any tools for it. However, SECTR is perfectly happy to work with meshes or terrains or a mix. It doesn't affect the underlying streaming it culling at all.

 

@MakeCodeNow Hi I have a few questions. I'm using Unity 2018.1 is sectr complete compatible?

Do you have a simple video overview of how terrains are setup with Sectr Core, Vis and stream? is it at all different from your current videos?

Is there a floating point fix sectr Complete provides if I had a helicopter flying distances?

Does Unity Plus work with streaming asynchronously?

Thank you.

 

SECTR works just fine with all versions of unity from 4.1 on up.

I don't have a video but there are demo scenes included in SECTR.

SECTR does not include floating point fixupp.

All versions of unity since 5.0 have included support for streaming.

 

Hi, everyone. I wanted to share some very good news - SECTR is joining the Procedural Worlds family of products and is now a sibling to great packages like Gaia and Pegasus. Adam and his team at Procedural Worlds are have some very cool ideas about how to evolve things like Gaia and SECTR together.

For my part, I'll still be active here, providing support and answering questions until the Procedural Worlds team is fully up to speed on SECTR.

 

Hey everyone,

We are very excited to have SECTR joining the Procedural Worlds family today!

Over the next few months we will work together with the author of SECTR to familiarize ourselves with the code base and ensure that the same high standard of customer support that both SECTR’s existing customers and Procedural Worlds customers enjoy is maintained.

For existing SECTR customers, please be assured that your investment is in good hands! We are working with Unity to migrate SECTR over to the Procedural Worlds publisher account. Your existing purchase is safe and when the migration is complete the changeover will be seamless.

Moving forward, we will continue to develop SECTR, and will also integrate it into our suite of products as part of our commitment to continually enhance the Procedural Worlds content generation and delivery pipeline.

You can learn more about Procedural Worlds at our web site here: http://www.procedural-worlds.com/

Cheers,
Adam.

 

I have a very large terrain and I want to split it up. The player follows a mostly defined path, but there are terrain details that are visible only at certain points, that are very far from the player. In other words, distant views when the player is up high and not-so-distant when he is low. Those distant areas eventually will get visited, they are part of the game rather than just scenery. If I split the terrain with SECTR will it automatically figure out which sectors need to be loaded given the current view? There is never a time when all sectors would be in view, but there are many times when a bunch could be in view, depending on the sector size. I think SECTR will do all this but want to make sure before spending $100US. I'm also very interested in whether GAIA could be used post-sectoring.

 

Sorry, one more question that is much more general. I've looked at the docs for Vis, Core, and Stream and it looks like collectively they will work for me. The docs are very minimal though, for example I only see info on how to bake lightmaps here in the forum, not in the docs. Similarly I see no mention of how to split terrains in the docs, or how to handle terrain textures and details after splitting the terrain, or how to handle proxy vistas. I can't find any demo videos for these features either. To be honest without the Firewatch GDC video I would have much less grasp of how this asset even functions.

There are several mentions of "it just works" in the forum, so I am tempted to dive in and figure out the details as I go. Is that a reasonable approach?

 

Hi @swredcam ,

I'm new to both packages, but I will be happy to try and test some things for you.
These distant views of the player. How far do you want the player to see? Are you using fog?
I'm pretty sure you can use Gaia on the terrain pieces, however pre-Gaia2 it would be tricky to do stamping where the pieces meet to not create seams.

If it's not too urgent, I would expect that, due to popular demand, Adam will soon make a video that will probably answer a lot of your questions. And I expect that video will be awesome.

 

Thank you, I'm not sure I can wait on the documentation though. I'll probably just go ahead and try it. I appreciate your interest frankslater.

 

SALE SALE SALE!!!

All Procedural Worlds Assets Are on Sale for 25% off - Including our recent SECTR acquisition!!

Plus - to sweeten the deal - we also have a stellar bunch of updates!!

Gaia 1.8.0 update is live:

• Added Mac 16 bit raw import
• Added 8 bit raw file import
• U2018 related fixes due to changed API's related to spawning prefabs
• Turned off automatic lightmap baking when creating news scenes
• Improvement to bounds based collision checking
• Added Terrain Utilities to Main menu to highlight it
• Reorganised More menus to make them more understandable
• Minor usability tweaks

GeNa 2.0.0 Upgrade is live ($20 for purchases > 90 days ago, free otherwise):

• Paintbrush painting mode
• New layer based spawning system & improvements
• Vastly improved bounds based collision checking
• Vastly improved rotation algorithm when doing fences
• New Min and Max spawn height capability & visualizations
• Height offset modification for collisions
• Seamless support for SECTR
• Preliminary Vegetation Studio support
• Improved help system
• Fully 2018.x compatible
• Better defaults.

CTS 1.8.0 update is live:

• New material & shader caching system
• Use of material enable materials shared between terrains
• New cached shader id system to speed up updates
• Better registration / deregistration system for multitile
• Component menu workarounds : CTS moved to GameObject menu
• Terrain now world space instead of vertex space (prelude to mesh blending)
• Improved terrain normals generation
• Moves shaders from Resources to Shaders directory to stop excessive compile times . Reorganised texture and profile directories
• Latest shader updates / amplify bug fixes

SECTR will be updated in next few days (currently in test)

• Seamless support for Gaia terrains
• Seamless support for CTS
• New suite of Video Tutorials

With all this new coolness, a bunch of new video tutorials will also come out later this week...

HUMBLE BUNDLE SALE

If you haven't already heard about it then do yourself a favor and check out the amazing Humble Bundle Sale! $15 gets you a bunch of cool games, a set of game dev courses valued at $600, and a whole bunch of premium unity assets.

 

Hi.

Bought SECTR into my open-world project, and my only issue is that after SECTR chops my terrain up, all my Vegetation Studio stuff is gone.

Is there a conflict between SECTR, and Veg Studio?

If not, is there a fix?

 

I believe that you need to add Veg Studio to every terrain you use it on. Just re-add to your terrains after sectorizing them.

 

I am testing the new update to get it ready for the team to release. I know when I played around with Sectr a couple of years ago when I tested it during the Gaia beta, Nathan had it so you could have certain things in the scene be persistent across all the scenes. Persistent probably isn't the right word, but there was a way to designate things that were to be applied to all of the new chunks. I'll look into it as I dig in this week and as I complete the QA tasks, I'll toss VS into the mix and see if I can figure that out as well. VS should be treated along the same lines as your sky system and other similar systems I would think. But again that is a guess and attempt to recall info from a long time ago. But it may be enough to get you started looking in the right direction in the documentation.

 

Hmn- that will have to be something I do, after I back everything up- I can see where errors on my part could lead to great loss. However, it's gotta be done- the load time on my current game world is seven damned minutes...

 

Is multi-scene export of chunks supported yet? It will save me having to place chunks in the main scene to export first, then place them back in their scene with the correct scene references. The reason why I did this is that I had memory/graphical issues on my open world game, where everything was in one scene. Splitting the assets over multiple scenes solved this.

 

Second reply, I know...

The problem is: Veg studio can only have one instance per scene, and said instance can only reference a single terrain.

Hmn. Will have to see what solutions there are out there...

 

Does sectr stream support split screen?

 

I'm not really sure what the requirements are for split screen or even how to setup a split screen game environment. I'd be curious to hear the results if anyone has done that before. I would guess that it would assuming that both splits are treated as their own dedicated scene view. But that is just a guess as I've no clue how that mechanic works.

 

Its 3rd person to boot. Just more or less2 cameras rendering in the same scene, each following a character. Just set the cameras to limit on veiw of the screen. Anything to do with a mouse s shot though. Cant use it for looking or to interact with a hud or what not. Caused some serious challenges.

 

Im jusy curious on how its set up. What are the sectrs loading to? Is it componet on a player? Is it based on tags? Im assuming a componet. Can 2 componets be run in a scene? Cause option 2. Is to break the map up with sectr core. Then script a activate/deactivate sectr based on distance to a gameobject(for each player). Which im sure would work, but id hope, that sectr system would be more efficient

 

You can reach your desired results in a few minutes for a practice session by exporting the open world demo scene in Sectr stream and duplicating the controller. Sectr stream supports multiple loaders. The one you are likely going to use is the region loader. I've used separate loaders to stream in small objects, terrains, and other based on layers.

It seems like you figured out how to split the screen by adjusting the camera viewport rect on the different cameras. Controls for each controller, I would think would need to be mapped to a joystick or keyboard for each individual split screen as you would not be able to use multiple mice.

 

xbox 1 controllers

 

Depending on how you set up streaming, this could be problematic. Personally, I think setting streaming up to split your terrain into multiple scenes is best for performance. But then my goal may be different from yours. My goal is a large Skyrim type world where loading the whole terrain into a single scene would just be problematic. If your game is mostly indoors or underground in caves/catacombs/mines/dungeons, I could see it all being able to be run in a single scene streaming in only the "room" contents which would be visible to the players. I know people use Sectr in networked games, I'm just not 100% sure about running multiple players within the same client.

The loader for streaming is attached to the camera, so since you have a camera for each player I would think it should work but it isn't something I've done myself. The type of loader you choose determines how things are activated/deactivated. Or if one of the loaders included doesn't fit your needs, you can create a custom loader.

Edited: Sounds like from the reply posted while I was typing this, it should in fact work! Thanks for the info @voncarp.

 

well ive been looking into map size, and im torn on how big to make it. either gaia 32k, or multiple 2k maps till im happy hahaha. its open world, but split screen.

 

I'm trying to setup a quick test in my Sectr test environment where I'm doing QA on version 1.4. Just need to figure out the viewport stuff as I've never changed it before. Camera 1 was easy. I just need to figure out how to push camera 2 to the right side of the screen. lol. This environment is 16k split into 512k chunks/scenes. so it will be good for seeing what happen when one player goes into another section which requires a new scene to be loaded or what happens when both are at different sides of the overall map.

 

this is how I set up the cameras

 

The H is the horizontal view of the camera. Setting it to .5 would make it half the screen.

Do that with both cameras and you have 2 half screen cameras. Then adjust the X on one camera to move the horizontal position of the view. It’s likely going to be .5 for half screen

 

For networked games, I would not recommend adding loaders to the other players that are networked into your view. Their rigid bodies and character controllers should be turned off for performance reasons and their positions and rotations would be in sync based on the server.

Sectr has a nice little component I think is called the hibernator. This component turns off renderers, physics, etc when that particular player/object is far from the player. It needs a bit of modification as it tends to shut off components that you need. Particularly, network components.

 

Hi there, Im just trying sectr in my game. I have a 2k gaia terrain and I am attempting to test the sectr terrain feature. I click window/sectr/terrain, a new window pops up which shows my terrian. There is no option to select it however and the select terrain to sectorize is greyed out. Is there other steps needed to use this feature?

 

Ive just tried to follow your guide for 32k terrain from a google search . but my option to secterize the terrain is greyed out. Did you setup something else before to make that option clickable?

 

LOL That's just too easy! I was thinking back to old UGUI days and trying to figure out actual numbers. I'm glad it is this way instead! lol

It is definitely doable. I actually couldn't get terrain to load up on my 512m chunk scene and after I had the same issue on my 1024k chunk test scene, I remembered that I had deleted all the scenes from my build to do a Gaia 1.9 single scene test and also needed to test making a build. So this is actually a 16k sq scene chunked out into 1024k chunks. I'm using a basic character controller that doesn't have all the input stuff so I just stripped all the character controller components and left him standing there having his dedicated camera with its own region loader component attached.

With soldier2 playing a statue near the center of the map, I moved soldier1 to the NW corner of the map. Upon pressing play, both scenes loaded and as I moved soldier1 towards the SE corner of the tile he spawned on, the three additional tiles streamed into active mode as my loader box opened their areas. Below are screenshots of my third monitor with the game window showing the split view of the two soldiers as well as screen clip showing scene/hierarchy/project windows from my second monitor. The root player object which contains my player model and camera are selected for both soldier1 and solder2 so their locations and loader "feeler" area is shown for each.

Also note the terrains are barren other than texturing. I personally don't recommend spawning a large terrain prior to breaking it up other than basic texturing. Even on a decent computer build, it crashed every time when I tried to split and chunk a 32k terrain with all the basic Gaia spawners run. I was successfully able to slit and chunk a Gaia spawned 16k terrain but it took hours. This same terrain with only textures spawned took just under an hour to split and chunk into 512m chunks and the time decreased for larger chunks, but performance decreased. With that said, testing to see if this worked I was just using standard unity terrain shader with Gaia spawned terrain textures. Don't hold the bland look against Gaia as I wasn't putting effort into making it pretty for this quick test. But on a side note, the clouds are from the upcoming Gaia 1.9 sky samplers. One of the many things we've added to replace the need for Unity's standard assets!

As for performance, with the split screen you are probably going to see your fps dropped in half because you are running 2 players in the same client and each player will require resources. Unfortunately I don't think the hibernation will work here like it would a multi-player game running off two clients. But I'll have to look into it more. It isn't something I've played around with yet.

 

Hi @Shawn67, did you see my post above?

 

I just noticed the email notification a few minutes ago and had to get to a stopping point on what I was working on.

No, that is the first step you would need to do. Do you already have some sectors defined or is this just a base Unity terrain? If you click on your terrain in your hierarchy window does it then allow you to do things? Oh! Is your terrain actually selected in the sectr terrain window? By default, it isn't. Click on it and see if the buttons become available.

 

Yeah, terrain is usuable in hirachy but is not selectable in sectr window. The terrain is there, but you cannot click on it and the bottom option is greyed out. Very strange. Im using 2018.2.15 PC standalone

 

Anybody else ever encounted the issue of not being able to selct the terrain in the sectr terrain menu? Do you need to create sectors first? or any other step i might of missed?

I presume it must be a bug somewhere.

Steps to recreate. Create new scene. create terrain. Goto Window/Sectr/Terrain In this menu try to click terrain. Does not click or highlight. Button "Select terrain to sectorize" is greyed out and unselectable.

Using Unity 2018.2.15 (Also have scripting API .NET 4.x) if that could possibly be an issue.

 

Didn't get a reply on this. If it's not supported I'll continue with the version I have modified.

 

Hi @julianr I missed your original post. No it is not as Procedural Worlds doesn't officially support beta versions since they change so rapidly. Our hope is to get all of our assets working for 2018.3 official release or shortly thereafter.

Sorry @AndyNeoman. I didn't forget about you. I was working on getting a test setup to try on 2018.2 and fell asleep at keyboard after being up all night. Just getting ready to try again after I eat a bite.

 

Hi @AndyNeoman. What else do you have installed in your project? Have you tried with a brand new project with just enough to build your terrain you want to split? I just created a new project with just Sect Complete imported from the asset store and Gaia 1.9 which I'm doing last minute pre-release testing on so I wasn't blinded by a white terrain while testing. lol Here are my steps:

1. Import Sectr from Asset Store
2. Import Gaia
3. Select Third Person, Desktop, Built-In renderer, and 16k for terrain size in Gaia Manager
   
4. Click Create Terrain and Show Stamper button in Gaia Manager Standard tab
5. Select terrain object in my scene Hierarchy window
6. Click the gear button in the Terrain component within the inspector window
7. Switch Width and Length to 32768 (32k) in the Resolution section of the Terrain component
8. Change the X and Z positions in the terrain's Transform to -16384 (-16k) to properly center the terrain.
   
9. I then navigate to Window -> SECTR -> Terrain and open the SECTR Terrain window where
   • if I had the terrain selected when I navigated through menu, it shows my terrain selected already in the SECTR Terrain window (blue selection bar with white lettering. Sectorize Terrain button works and I can also click within the selection area of the window and it deselects the terrain in which case I can then reselect it.
   • If I didn't have the terrain selected in the hierarchy, my terrain just shows up alone in the selection list (black text with no bar) in which if I then click it, it shows as selected and the sectorize button becomes available.
10. I then put 16 in the width and length and I left all the other boxes unchecked. This leaves the grid squares a bit larger than I'd actually use but was just doing a quick test to make sure it created my grid. This is actually the same way I prepare to start laying out stamps in the tutorial.
    
11. At this point I click the sectorize button. All this will do is create a grid of sectors without slicing your terrain up.

Like I said, this part worked flawlessly for me. I tested on 2018.2.4f1. It is a little earlier in the 2018.2 life cycle but I dont think it should make that much of a difference compared from going to one version to another. That is just the 2018.2 version I already have installed. Internet is being flaky and downloading anything large has become a challenge. lol I also did this both with the default .Net 3.5 and then tried with .Net 4.x. I had no issues with either.

So I'm thinking there has to be something else that is conflicting and causing problems or you have errors in your console that are causing issues. In my project all I had was one deprecation warning for a sectr core file.

 

Thanks for getting back to my @Shawn67 . Ive just tested in my next project and it does work fine there. It must be an asset in my other game that is causing the conflict. Be tricky to find it as I was trying to add to a game about to be released so cant really remove things to check but if i find the culprit i will let you know so you can make users aware of conflict or even solve the issue.

EDIT:- Now i can follow along with your tutorial is there a second part? Where i have got to putting sectrs in hasn't actually done anything for performance i presume there are more steps to follow.

EDIT 2 :- Ive now split the terrain now and get +10fps which is a nice start. Also I can confirm that veg pro works with biomes over the split terrain. (Very basic quick testing i should add) nice though. Looking forward into getting upto speed on the possibilities.

Andy

 

Sorry Shawn, not sure if you misread the post or I just got confused with your answer. Mine was relating to the version of SECTR Stream that exporting chunks that are in different scenes that are in one project causes issues when importing them back into your scene, and they do not reference correctly in the chunk properties. You have to export chunks in one main scene.

What I do is copy the GameObjects into the main scene first, (if they are in another scene) export them, then put them back into the scene they came from, copy the chunk files over to a directory that matches the same scene name, and go into each chunk asset, change the reference to point to the chunk location.

The reason why I do this, is that my open world game has a lot of assets (in 2017.x of Unity) there are memory limitations per scene (not sure if this applies to 2018.x though), as you get assets missing from the build and graphical glitches if it goes over that limitation. I get around this by cutting up the game objects into multiple scenes, where each scene has multiple chunks.

 

So, with sectr stream, i could make say a map, using 100. 1k terrains. Then sectr them together and have a 100k map?

 

Hi @Shawn67, Edit, Issue fixed by running demo scene and then returning to my scene. Terrain now selectable. not entirely sure why lol.

 

What are the advantages of this system compared to just using Unity Occlusion Culling and CullingGroups?

 

Hello,

I grabbed the opportunity and bought SPECTR today.
Then tried the demos and... I might be missing the point.

I could not see like NO change in stats at all when switching culling off and on. Same number of tris, batches, render time and CPU main.

What should I expect?

 

Not sure why the demo didn't work for you. But I can assure you that this product does work.. in my open world I have a vast amount of game objects and without using SECTR stream, it grinds to a halt.

Edit: Use it with Unity Occlusion, but did try vis a short while back and it seemed ok, but I think I'm not on the latest release of Sectr Core, one or two releases back.

 

He Mentioned Occlusion so I think he's talking about SectorVis, not SectorStream.