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

I have not fully analyzed it yet, but I noticed that if the gameobject is disabled before the game / scene starts, the effect you are describing occurs, if the gameObject is disabled after the scene has been initialized, you can disable / re-enable the gameObject and the renderers should be re-enabled accordingly as well.
I assume this has to do with how the Sector collects its Members & Childs.
Would it be a possible workaround to deactivate the gameObjects only after the scene has started?

 

This is what is currently happening; we only use one scene and use prefabs for everything, so the gameobjects are only being deactivated after the scene is loaded

 

That is weird, because that was certainly working for me in that constellation. Does the deactivation happen immediately on scene load in such an event as OnEnable, Start, etc.?
If you find the time, could you please check if it works or does not work for you when you run the VIS advanced culling demo scene and deactivate / reactivate the stack of boxes during runtime? (That is what I did when trying to reproduce this)

 

So I went ahead and enabled / disabled those objects in the demo scene. Most of the objects kept working correctly after that, but there were some weird bugs and inconsistencies with lights enabling / disabling incorrectly

What I'm really hoping for is a method that loops through all children and resets their state, it doesn't even have to be called automatically.
What I assume is happening is that a mesh is disabled by the culling engine; then the game object is disabled; then when the game object is re-enabled, the mesh is considered to be starting disabled so it's never re-enabled by the culling engine

EDIT: If it helps, these objects aren't children of any sectors, but are instead members that are between sectors (They are doors between rooms, where rooms are sectors and these doors are siblings of those sectors)

EDIT AGAIN: I was able to workaround this by adding the following code to my between-room doors:

Code (CSharp):

1.     MeshRenderer[] renderers = GetComponentsInChildren<MeshRenderer>();
2.     for (int i = 0; i < renderers.Length; i++) {
3.       renderers[i].enabled = true;
4.     }
5.     Light[] lights = GetComponentsInChildren<Light>();
6.     for (int i = 0; i < lights.Length; i++) {
7.       lights[i].enabled = true;
8.     }
9. sectrMember.ForceUpdate(true);
10.  

 

Unity version 2019.3.0b3:

Assets\Procedural Worlds\SECTR\Scripts\Vis\SECTR_CullingCamera.cs(369,13): error CS0103: The name 'RenderPipeline' does not exist in the current context

There is also no SECTR menu entry...

 

2019.3 is still a beta version of Unity, and we don't support alpha and beta versions for our products: The alpha and betas can show issues of their own (as expected for an alpha / beta) which then are wrongly attributed to our products and they also tend to change every couple of days, which makes it difficult to track down & permanently fix issues.
Please use Sectr in Unity 2019.2, you should not run into these issues there.

 

So we wait for the final release of the 2019.3 and then wait for you to fix this? You cannot tell me that you are not working on it already. This is a real cop out answer.

 

Yes, this is how we handle alpha / beta versions for all our products.

This has nothing to do with "copping out" but is a business decision to make best use of our development resources. Supporting alpha and beta versions would mean we need to invest a lot of time of fixing issues that might immediately break again with the next alpha / beta patch and chasing issues that ultimatively might turn out to be "unfixable" (from our position) Unity bugs.
The public visible part of the unity issue tracker currently shows close to 2000 bugs for the 2019.3 beta, each with the potential to generate a support request wrongly attributed to our assets. (A not entirely fair picture - you would not bring every bug reported there in association with our assets, but the takeaway is the potential for something like this happening is definitetly there, and has indeed happened in the past)
All this creates a significant overhead of development time for the benefit of "being able to use our assets earlier in an unstable environment unsuitable for actual development". We think the development time is invested better in improving our assets and adding new features which creates lasting value instead.

 

I have a feature suggestion which I think might be a good enhancement in general:

In our game, our FPS arms are using a special shader which takes light differently then the standard shader. This means that when lights are culled, they cause flickering on the arms only

Would it be possible to add an enhancement that kept lights that don't cast shadows within a configurable distance from getting culled? That way, we could say something like "don't cull lights that don't cast shadows within X distance of the player"

This might be too game specific for this general addon, if so I'd appreciate being pointed in a direction that would make this happen or a place I could hook into the code to make the change locally

Thanks!

 

That should be possible, yes. At a certain point a decision is being made about objects/lights being culled, and it should be possible to add in an additional check there.

I would need to fully wrap my head around this as well to see where the best place for that would be or how to best realize this. You could start by looking at the Function "_FrustrumCull" in "SECTR_CullingCamera.cs". In about line 1586 you can see how lights are being evaluated and collected in a List for "visibleLights". You would need to skip this check somehow and just say "that one is always visible no matter what" because it is one of the non-shadow lights near the player. The problem is that those are not the actual light objects being processed, but abstract sector child objects. But there should be some way to get the info across, e.g. by adding a flag for this child object that is filled elsewhere.

 

Hey so I've discovered a bug which I believe is related to SECTR_Member.cs

I've discovered that every other time you enable and disable a member, the children appear then disappear. So you disable / enable one time, the children disappear; disable / enable another time, the children reappear - repeat ad infinitum. This is causing us huge problems because we are constantly enabling and disabling member components

Here is a picture of the component's settings:


It is a child of a sector about three transforms up with these settings:


Our camera settings:


Any advice would be appreciated!

EDIT: I've attached a video showing what I mean
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/512364636654534669/632724835708960788/RBmWr9CnuC.mp4

 

Hi, I just bought Sectr and have a fundamental question.

Can I continue to edit the terrain,project as usual AFTER sectrizing?

Thanks

 

Hi, will SECTR be able to handle underground cave systems? In the demo videos, I always see box rooms and box hallways.

And would be the SECTR Audio propagation feature able to handle more complex cave networks as well?

Thanks

 

Hi, is it possible to adjust the distance sectr vis culls at, I have some corridors that go off to the left and right that pop in, I'd like to perhaps allow adjacent sectors to be shown too?

 

A few questions after testing my first sectorization.

I was running at 60fps + with occasional drop to 45+ with CTS plus all of my vegetation studio assets in the scene on a Build. (36x2048 tiles)

After sectrising I have a few issues.

First: The vegetation isnt loaded at all
Second: FPS is only 90 without vegetation (it was previously 100+ without vegetation.
Third: The clipping planes in the camera are completely ignored?

Im trying a build to check the FPS and results but based on the editor play mode the Clipping Planes is the biggest issue (apart from the vegetation not loading).

In a game where I fly a lot, sectr needs to pay attention to Clipping Planes on camera. Is there a way to solve that issue? As well as the vegetation studio issue. (I added the terrains to VSPro.

Many thanks

ADDITION AFTER BUILD: Results as bad as I expected from the above issues. Loads far too slow at present, removes terrains behind me but needs to load more in front of me through clipping plane/distance.

Would normal occlusion culling be better in this case as it is a flying game.?

 

Did some more digging, it looks like the issue is that every other time the member is enabled / disabled, the renderers, lights, etc are cleared but not children

Enable / disable 1, 3, 5, 7, ...


Enable / disable 2, 4, 6, 8, ...


EDIT: I was able to fix the issue by changing the following lines of code inside SECTR_Member. I'm not sure why the renderer wasn't added to a child if it wasn't culled (that doesn't make any sense). I'm not sure exactly what is going on but if there are no problems caused by doing this then it's a good temporary fix for us for now

Code (CSharp):

1.             this.renderer = renderer;
2.             this.light = (light && (light.type == LightType.Point || light.type == LightType.Spot)) ? light : null;

 

hello zornor90, first of all, I would like to apologise for the late reply, over the last few days we have had an amazing release of Gaia PRO, Real Ivy 2, GeNa 2.5 that has caused a lot of questions to be asked and support to be swamped with all kinds of questions.

when it comes to the issue at hand we have put it down as something to fix/look into it the first chance we get. the fix provided is a big help in the correct direction. let me know if there are any other issues that arise. I will notify you when the issue has been looked at.

 

hey Hawk0077 its best to always make a backup before sectrizing your scene, besides that you can continue to edit the terrain & your project after sectrizing. there are some limitations that can occur but nothing that should stop you from your normal workflow. I would recommend following the tutorials and quickstart guides to ensure the best possible experience. I have included a link to sectr tutorials.
http://www.procedural-worlds.com/sectr/?section=tutorials

 

yep, Sector audio is all about creating rich, complex & efficient soundscapes with ease. thankyou for the feedback about the demos. I have included below some main features of Sectr audio.

• Easy to use, powerful audio authoring GUI.
• Built-in randomization, fading, and templates.
• Hierarchical and adaptive, HDR mixing.
• Point and volumetric sound sources.
• Efficient, realtime audio occlusion.
• Dynamic environmental audio propagation.
• Nestable, stackable, 3D audio environments.
• Optimized for maximum quality and performance.

 

Thanks, I checked the tutorials but will look again. I didnt hear anything about the clipping plane though. Is there a way to fix the far clipping plane issue?

 

caught me while I was writing this up

when it comes to the issues mentioned, have you set up vs pro for streaming?
https://www.awesometech.no/index.php/setting-up-run-time-loaded-terrains/

when it comes to the clipping I believe what your after is the region loader load size. included an image it's on the camera in question.


I would also recommend you profile your scene to find out what you can do about improving performance.
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/ProfilerWindow.html

hi derkoi, the best way to accomplish that would be to override the bounds.

increasing the bounds parameters will increase the parameters before its culled.

 

Thank you Dolly, much appreciated

 

I think that there is a part that I have just started using SECTR COMPLETE and I do not understand in detail.

Questions about SECTR VIS
Even if there was a large wall between the camera and the object, the object could not be erased.
I think that if the camera and the object (Member) are in the same Sector, this system cannot erase objects that are not in the camera's field of view (such as behind the camera)?

If I want to erase an object that is not in the field of view near the camera, does that mean that the Sector is divided into small pieces?
Is there a function to help with the placement if it is necessary to divide it finely?

 

Hello, In an open world scene, do I need to finish everything such as whole scene designs and gameplay first before I can use SECTR COMPLETE? Is it the last thing to do like all open world game? Do you have any advice?

 

The occlusion culling by VIS works by analyzing the sectors and the portals connecting them, here is a visualization of the process, the blue vision cones are evaluated through the green portals that connect the different sectors with each other to determine which room is visible for the player and which is not:



If the wall you mentioned and the objects behind it are part of the same sector the objects behind the wall will not be culled, because the wall does not separate two sectors, it is just another object. If sectr would evaluate the occlusion of every single wall and pillar etc. in the scene, it would most likely need to bake that information - which would lead to a system like unitys built in occlusion culling that relies on a baking process.

If the wall fully divides the sector you could make two sectors out of it instead, if the wall has an opening you could create the two rooms as two sectors connected with a portal.

Do you mean the placement of the objects in the fitting sectors? The terrain window has a drag and drop area that allows you to drag gameobjects on it to find the fitting sector in the scene according to the bounds or the position of the GameObject.

 

Answered this on discord earlier today, where the same question was posted, copying the answer over here for potential lurkers:


It depends a bit: If you are doing open world with large terrains, it would be good if your terrain is largely finalized, or you can do a workflow where you work on a larger terrain, and then split it up for streaming again from scratch when you make larger changes. The reason for this is as following: As soon as you split up your terrain for streaming, it becomes just more difficult to edit it. With a single terrain, you can just add a mountain to it, and that's it then. When the terrain is split up in 256 smaller terrains you need to load in all the smaller terrains at once, you need to have a tool that can do multiterrain editing (the newer Gaia version Gaia Pro can do this now) to get your mountain in across those terrains. If there is a base full of enemy npcs you wanted to move around, you would need to remove it from the sectors first, then move the base around, then make sure all the moved content is in the right sectors now again so it loads at the correct place. So to sum that up: While you can still make changes after you added streaming, it just takes you more time to do so, so from that perspective it would be good if your terrain layout is somewhat finished before you introduce streaming, OR

You do a workflow where you work on larger terrains that are then always cut up and re-exported for streaming anew when you want to test / run the game. This is, to my knowledge how AAA studios handle this as well, this video about the Far Cry 5 map design mentions at some point that the designers work on a larger world, and over night the changes are being processed into the streamable world so that they appear in the actual game.

Regarding gameplay you should always keep in mind that certain parts of the game world might not exist anymore because it is unloaded and your gameplay would need to handle this in some way. (e.g. what happens to an enemy NPC where the terrain is being unloaded at his position? Do you save the enemy then and unload him as well, or do you just deactivate them & reactivate when the player comes near again?)

Another user asked also regarding interactivity & saving data between scenes recently, this was another scenario we discussed:

When saving the scene / game state, it depends very much on your gameplay which data you would need to save here. There are some things that are no different than any regular game, for example saving which dialogue options the player already talked through with an NPC. Those are independent of the scene / streaming setup. But you need to take special care whenever it would affect the initial state of a scene in one way or another. Let's say the player finds a box in scene A, carries it over to scene B and drops it there - if this box should stay in place when the scene unloads & loads again due to streaming, you would need to save that - - the box has been removed from the original scene A (so it won't respawn every time scene A is loading) - a box is now present in scene B with a certain position and rotation How you do that exactly is up to you, you can for example create a wrapper object for the box in scene A that will only load the box if the player has not actually taken it, and have some component or flag on the box itself, so that you know as soon as a scene unloads that contains the box you need to store that boxes position and rotation in the scene data for scene B. When scene B is being loaded you would need to check if there is any box object stored for it and if yes, create a box accordingly in that position and rotation.

 

Hi, is there a way to create a cell grid without using a terrain?

 

Yes....and no What you can do in this case is: Make a fake terrain of the desired total grid size, then select the cell size accordingly as you need them and then uncheck the option to split up the terrain. This will just create a grid of sectors and then you can throw out the fake terrain again.

 

Hi there! I'm working on an open world RPG and my head is spinning a bit with all the terrain / world generator assets I'm looking through.

I just want to make sure I understand the functionality of this correctly.

1. So basically, to understand this asset, I can make a terrain (or several) and this will split them and deactivate ones that are not needed by the player character? This works with regular Unity terrains and with GAIA I presume?

2. If that's all correct, could this be used to create a large open world like Skyrim and have only the parts near the player be active at any one time? What about larger worlds getting into something like 2,000 km^2 or higher?

Thanks in advance!!!

 

Yes, correct. The terrains will be placed into separate scene files that are loaded as required, so the terrains are not only deactivated but completely loaded / unloaded from memory as well then.

In theory yes, but with very large worlds you will run into floating point precision issues sooner or later. Sectr has a fix built in for that, but that comes with certain tradeoffs as well. Creating such a huge landscape will also be a logistical challenge as you most likely won't be able to load all those terrains into the editor at the same time. If you wanted to do things like changing textures on the terrain in your world, you would probably need to write additional scripts that automate that (loading in one terrain after another, exchanging the texture, unloading it).
Last but not least keep in mind that creating the content for such a large world might be challenging in itself. If you do a typical RPG like Skyrim you can easily spend 8 hours just placing things and creating quests for a single square kilometer, and then those are just created but not balanced & tested yet. So you would look at 2000 person days or 5 and a half years for a single person of just placing things in the editor. Of course you can compensate this with a larger team and procedural generation of content etc. but the takeaway is: Consider the time it will take you to create meaningful content for your game world, this can become a real problem at some point.
So in theory you can create very large worlds, but in practice you would need to create supporting workflows and the workload surrounding it can become immense.

 

Thanks a million for your detailed reply. I have a followup question if you don't mind:

1. Do you know if SECTR needed / works well with GAIA Pro? I saw that GAIA Pro has multi-terrain features and I'm just not sure if that would play well with SECTR. I'm trying to decide if I need both or just one of them and I don't wanna get both if they won't work well together.

Also, thanks for your insight on the large terrain problem. Frankly, it's likely I won't make something so big, I doubt I have the skill for it yet, but I would really love to at least experiment with making something, less like Skyrim, and more like Daggerfall. That is, huge stretches of terrain, mostly traversed via map, with randomly generated stuff in between. So I like knowing the limits of the tools haha

Thanks again!

 

Anyone used this in combination with Mapmagic?

 

Haven't gotten to use it yet but I was wondering if SECTR Stream is able to pull down new scenes from a server. i.e. My scenes are too big to have the user download them with the game (each about 1GB). I would like the user to play scene one, then go on and have scene 2 pulled down from a server, scene 3, etc...

 

No, unfortunately not, Sectr would expect the scenes to be present as regular unity scenes at the moment it loads them in, there is no downloading / network aspect included of any sorts.

 

Hi, I have doubts about two possible separate projects:

1. Works for procedurally generated environments, for example a procedural dungeon whit hand-made rooms (prefabs)?

2. Any problem/consideration using with a multiplayer project?

Thanks!

 

The occlusion culling and Audio parts of Sectr would work, streaming would not work since this takes some preparation tasks during design time (exporting streamable content into separate scenes) that can't be performed on the fly during runtime.

Streaming the a world with SECTR in a networked game should work with each client streaming the world independently, but the information that you exchange over network between the players must take into account that the one player might have different sectors loaded in as the other player.
For example if player A drops an item at a certain position, runs away so the scene gets unloaded on his client, player B comes 10 minutes later and wants to pick up the item dropped by player A before. You would need to develop a logic that remembers that an item exists there where it was dropped, or you would need to keep the item alive at that position for both clients so they can come back later and interact with it.

 

hi does this asset works with bakery light baker? anyone have successfully used bakery combined with sector and portal scene steaming?

 

also does this work with addressable?

 

Does Sectr Vis do occulsion culling at runtime? without anysetup in editor?

 

No experience values yet, but if bakery works with a multi scene setup it should work with SECTR as well.

Unless you are doing something exotic with adressables that should work as well: How the streaming with Sectr works is it exports the streaming contents out in separate scenes which are then asynchronously loaded around the player as required. So if your adressable assets are loaded in regularly when the scene they are in is loaded as well, they should work fine with SECTR.

 

The Vis culling does NOT require a baking process, but it still requires you to set up portal connections between the sectors in the editor. The portal connections can be created via scripting at runtime as well though.

 

2019.3 support?

 

What's the difference between Sectr and "Ambient Sounds - Interactive Soundscapes" why are they separate products?

Can Sectr do everything Ambient Sounds does and if not do they integrate with each other?

Mainly looking to know if Sectr has a solution for dynamic audio.

Thank you.

 

The audio capabilities of sectr do have some intersection with ambient sounds in so far as that you can set up ambient audio (a background loop and some random sfx being played) for the different rooms / sectors that you create in SECTR. Ambient Sounds works independently of Sectors within its own Audio areas and has more options for setting up those ambient environments and making them interactive (certain sounds only play when certain gameplay conditions are met).

We took over Sectr as it was from the original developer and developed Ambient Sounds from scratch ourselves. Sectr has other features past Audio as well, most importantly streaming.

No, Ambient Sounds has more elaborate features for setting up Ambient Audio Areas and making them interactive. Both assets should work fine alongside each other without any special integration being required.

There are playable demo scenes for both assets online (Windows build): Ambient Sounds - no instructions needed, just download and start and the demo will guide you through https://onedrive.live.com/download?...64A01C86F32936!140716&authkey=AGqcXkHodfsqcjU SECTR Audio - please read the forum post first so you can get a better impression of what is demonstrated https://forum.unity.com/threads/rel...sive-spatial-audio.229905/page-6#post-4181131

 

Not yet but it will, 2019.3 is not an official release yet, we are working on the 2019.3 release though so please stay tuned!

 

Hi! I am looking for a way to activate/deactivate terrains according to the player position in much the same way as the Neighbour Loader works. In my case streaming isn't an option hence I am working solely with the Sectorised terrains. Is there a script that would implement this or would I need to edit the Neighbour Loader? Cheers.

 

You would need to edit the loader or the sector chunk.

 

Hello. Does this work for VR especially Oculus quest for streaming multiple levels?

 

I wouldn't see why not, I have not yet tested this, but I'm sure it can be done. You can do world streaming and terrain streaming.

 

Now 2019.3 is officially out, can you give us a little roadmap on what's are the plans for SECTR ?

thx