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

I opened up an older project to resume work today and noticed that the import/export button for individual scene chunks in the SECTR stream window are no longer present. I imported all SECTR chunks and moved the objects out of the chunks to start fresh. I am still not seeing the buttons. Is anyone else experiencing anything similar?

 

Can you please tell me what Unity version you are using?

 

I'm running 2018.2.5f1 for this project

 

Yes, this doesn't look correct. Have you already turned the terrain into chunks? If so then you would use the stream window to export them (unload and reload them). If that window is not working then you may need to reimport. Are you getting any errors?

 

@BryanPW Does SECTR support Unity 2020.1? I guess you have to now to be listed in the Asset Store - is that right?

 

I’m using 2020.1 (latest update) with URP. It’s all working fine except maybe the light baking function which used to work and for some reasons it’s not generating light maps for each chunk.

Maybe @BryanPW can you have a look ? May not be the product as well but still struggling this problem for a little while.

Thx for your help

 

Hello,
I have a tricky challenge: is there a way to loop over the streamed terrain? I mean for a 3x3 chunk terrain template like in the example below:

A  B  C

D  E  F

G  H  I

if the player going upward (from E to B) then reaches the top of B, could he see H? This might need kind of non-Euclidean tech somehow to tackle to the "teleport" issue. Indeed, the new top H should have same gameobject or other players at the corresponding location and not empty new H chunk. Perhaps possible with "cameras portals"?
Thanks!

 

Yes, it does.

 

I will see what I can come up with.

 

Can you please tell me what assets you are using for lighting?

 

Currently, out of the box, this is not possible without making your own script to do so.

 

Hi,
Is there a way to use SECTR Vis without the camera frustrum culling and only the position of the camera? I only want the SECTR_Sector in which the camera is and all it's linked sectors (via active portals) to be drawn.

We've got doors at every portals position and deactivate the portal when they are closed.

The idea would be to save performace on CPU.

Thanks for your help,

 

I was going through the manual and I have a few questions.

1. How do you use Wwise / fmod with this, Is there an integration?
2. Is Sectr compatible with Cinemachine and Timelines?
3. Is the floating point fix compatible with Cinemachine and Timelines?
   
4. When streaming chunks how do you deal with saving and restoring the game state of chunks? (like debris from a building that exploded with parts spread out everywhere by physics or a vehicle that moved to another chunk)
5. Are there callbacks when a chunk gets loaded and unloaded?

Regarding point 4, it's easy to save a simple bool state "isDestroyed" for objects globally and then destroy the object again when a chunk reloads but I'm talking about preserving the result of the initial destruction. Simply destroying the object again will never look the same.

I'm also worried about our use of procedural mesh destruction + deformation AND the fact that we are painting decals to object textures at runtime. Do you think any of this will have issues in sectr?

 

Hi there,
I just want to confirm this is the right kind of product for my needs.

I'm looking for something to replace Unreal's level streaming functionality. For example, the game Visage utilizes this feature, and the entire game can be beaten with very minimal loading screens (maybe just one?). Is this basically the way to achieve this functionality with Unity?

Thank you!

 

Hi there!
Amazing tool. I am using to optimize my game right now. I do have a question.
I cannot understand how to use the Occluder. I follow the documentation BUT the occluded objects (behind the occluder) are still drawn in the editor. Am I missing something? thanks a lot for your help,

Dom

 

Yes, this will provide world streaming, streaming in your terrains and objects, while exporting them and importing terrains. It will turn your terrains into chunks and will group all the objects within the sectors as well.

You can set the size of the loading that you want to happen along with the unload and load buffer.

There are some really cool things you can do with this asset as well. For example, you could program it to say after so much time goes on in-game, let's replace this chunk with a different variation of the same chunk.

 

When you sectorized the terrain did you select the group static objects and group dynamic objects?

 

1. I have no idea about these tools so I can not tell you for certain.
2. Timelines I believe so, with some programming knowledge. You could set it to say after a certain time replaces one chunk x with chunk y.
3. The floating-point fix should work with the timeline
4. They are exported and imported and deal and act as a new scene.
5. There is a buffer to unload and load but you can set the variable.

 

Thank you for replying.

Regarding point 4, do you guys have some docs detailing what happens during export/import of the chunks at runtime?

As for point 1, with your tools clearly being aimed at larger projects I am surprised you haven't looked into it. Every sound designer in the industry uses one or the other, it's their main work tool. From what I understand their "in engine" plugins completely changes how you handle audio in unity which probably means none of your assets' audio features are compatible. If you're aiming for studios that can afford multiple licenses of your products you can't ignore it, It's the industry standard.

 

Do you mean the broken a** Unity integration plugins for said tools?
You will have problems with pretty much all assets compatibility. At the end of the day - Asset Store doesn't make people rich. You can't expect them to handle full integration with everything out there and keep it up to date all the time. SECTR has full source code included - larger studios will add the compatibility themselves in case they buy SECTR. Also, large studios make almost everything themselves anyway.
Furthermore - SECTR is not that expensive. Single dev can buy it. It is weird to suggest that only large studios can afford it.

Did you even try SECTR Audio? It handles lots of stuff that FMOD/Wwise does. SECTR (from my humble POV) seems to be aimed for small/medium size teams (it was made by Firewatch devs after all, which was a smaller team) who most likely don't even have any full-time audio designers. And for these teams (such as ours) it is perfect. It handles spatialization, occlusion etc. Everything is inside Unity. And is very well done, thought out and documented.

Lol... industry standard... and what about Project Triton? Google Resonance? Steam Audio? There should be an integration for these too, right? And what about audio solutions many many Unity devs use, like Master Audio or SoundToolKit?

 

Procedural World has decided to break away from the traditional asset store model and sell new versions of its products every few years which I completely understand, the old model was unsustainable. It's the only way Unity will ever get the quality tools it deserves. But I do expect more from them.

It's true that larger studios do a lot in house but there is a very large gap between Ubisoft/EA and a two guy studio. A lot of small to medium sized teams do use Wwise / Fmod and don't have the time to build everything in house.

You seem to think I was bitching on Procedural World or something, I'm only suggesting they look into something that can grow their customer base. Their tools are the best out there and will be looked at by any studio developing with Unity. They should at least know what works and doesn't and be able to explain why. It's like if Unity couldn't tell me if 3dsMax, Maya or Blender was compatible with Unity.

Yes, Wwise is pretty much the industry standard. Spatialization and occlusion is just a part of what it does, if it's all you need go ahead and use Master Audio, Audio tool kit or one of the others you mentioned. They are all excellent solutions.

Unfortunately the reality is that when hiring a professional either you give him the tools he wants or you hire someone else.

FYI I do own SECTR and tried it many times.

 

When the Region loader bounds activate the chunk it's loaded in. Most of the time without the player knowing. There is a GDC talk about this and some really cool tricks you can do with it.

As far as the Fmod and Wwise comments, all of our assets still integrate with Unity. However, as I have stated I have never used them as I have used Sectr audio to set up the audio that I create and place it into the scenes. Ambient sounds work with the Unity mixer as well, and you can set the audio clips as well.

I will have to try to get them and test for myself, as I said I have never used them so I am unsure.

If you want to watch the GDC Talk its a little old but I recommend it:

 

Awesome thank you very much for linking this video.

Thank you for looking into it. As long as the features of CORE, STREAM and VIS are compatible (and im guessing they are) the AUDIO features will be handled by the plugins.

FYI your link to the manual is broken on the asset store's page "More Information & Manuals on our website"

 

Thank you
Here is the link: https://www.procedural-worlds.com/products/indie/sectr/sectr-tutorials/

 

After looking into it Sectr still uses / codes with the native Unity audio component and listener to do the sound playback. If the tools support / use them it more than likely works.

 

Hello, @BryanPW ,
Regarding my question above, do you know if there's a way to simplify the Culling cost?

Thanks!

 

There is a checkbox for simple culling in the sectr vis component, it does not fully evaluate all the connections between the sectors anymore then, but does just a frustum culling on the camera. It takes less time to evaluate what is visible then, but could save some performance!

 

Hi there! I have a little weird question about chunks.
We have a large scene and we cut them into many sectors by SECTR , it works great.
My main scene is about 100MB big with lots of meshes etc.
When it's divided into 3 chunks, each chunk.unity subscene file's size is 30MB.
However the main scene which has only 3 empty chunk component, is still 100MB.( Which means they are 190MB in total with duplicated data)
ps: The picture shows *.unity file always keeps the whole data after chunks are exported.

 

When you sectorize the terrain it will turn them into the desired chunk size. It will leave the Terrains in there that you can either keep or get rid of. Then it takes your chunks and makes scenes out of them, so you will have scene data that it needs to save. Note that you can go into the streaming and export all of the terrains out of the scene. Just be sure to add a loader to the player / camera.

 

Thanks for your attention sincerely!
Is there a way to clean the terrain data(which is already saved by exporting to chunk scene file) and to make the main scene's size smaller? Or maybe I have to keep double size of the terrain data for streaming?

 

You could export the terrain data to a separate folder and delete the ones in the scene (not the chunks). In the editor, you could reduce the textures and terrain resolutions and try to save some data there as well. I believe there are some tools to reduce the splat maps or delete ones you don't need. I honestly cant remember the asset but I believe there was one I ran across a long time ago!

 

Thanks,I created a new scene, copied chunk component to the new scene, the new scene's size is much smaller. That means the residual data is stored in Sector Component.
Also, I've tested once a pure chunk finish its first import&revert operation under editor, the scene's size will grow.
Anyway, I'll try to find the asset you mentioned.

 

Hi using Unity 2019.4.11f1 with sectr, just picking up the basics with the package and want to use it with the HDRP.

Is sectr compatible with HDRP? and the version of unity im using 2019.4.11f1?

currently the test scene for the open world terrain is totally pink and some other assets should I just replace the material as wizard fix doesn't work?

 

Yes, sectr does work with HDRP. This normally would not impact this, however. Are you using Gaia?
If so make sure that you go to the Gaia Manager and go to the setup tab- render settings and change it to HDRP.

Also, to change materials I would go to edit menu- render pipeline- upgrade project materials to HDRP.

 

Please separate out SECTR VIS as a stand alone asset like it used to be, it's the only thing I am interested in and I'd rather not pay $100 for everything. You should do this for all the different systems if they can be used in isolation and bundle them at a discount like other devs are doing.

 

Hi, Is it possible to SECTR-ize an open-world scene without an explicit terrain object? In my case my 'terrain' is a bundle of meshes.
Is there any tutorial for that?
Thanks!

 

Yes this is possible take a look at the Sectr - Demos - Core- Simple Scene

 

Thanks, I know that demo, but is there a way to automatically divide the scene in equal sectors like with the terrain?

 

Would this be helpful with streaming large caves carved out with the digger asset?

 

Hi is it possible to use sector with mesh terrains rather than unity terrains, I mean the quick and easy auto scene division part you can use with terrains. I like easy

 

It is possible yes, but depends on when you want to split them. You would need to have your mesh terrains already split before sectorizing them.

If you are wanting to use mesh terrains then have all the terrains ready to go before using sectr. You can create your mesh terrains and even multiple mesh terrains using Gaia Pro's Terrain Exporter system.

Select all of your terrains and then turn them into meshes. Now you can inject them into sectr and use them, but you will not be able to turn the mesh terrains into chunks. So make sure that the terrain sizes when you create them are what you want the end result to be.

 

Yes I don't see why not.

 

Hey there,

I may want to buy sectr because of the current attractive price, but I just have some questions before : I watched your tutorial video and after unloading terrain, there is no impostor or any replacement. I suppose you can load a low res sector when unloading high res sectors ?

More globally, my game uses meshes terrains (saw the post above, they already are splitted ). All my meshes are combined by chunks (thanks to the amazing asset "Mesh combine studio"). They also all have LODs. But this has a big memory cost. So I would like to unload LOD0 and 1 when my chunks are far away, to only display LOD2.
Will SECTR make my life easier to achieve that ?

Thanks in advance for you time

 

Hi Bryan.

For terrain i'm using satellite images as textures. I wonder how I can adjust the resolution of each tile after splitting the all terrains so that it doesn't look like a mosaic of repeated images?
Is in your tool any procedural or manual way to ajust it tiles resolution, a way to split the texture resolution too or any other "cleaver then me" solution?
Thanks,
Joan

pd
It's been a while but keep interested in this topic.
Thanks,

 

New Video coming tomorrow. "Apollo's Dream II" Using tons of assets, as usual.
Hope everyone enjoys it, the scene and music has been in the works for a long time. We are glad we are finally coming to a final product.

Keep an eye on our YouTube for the new video.
https://www.youtube.com/user/silverthorndavid/videos
View attachment 829052

 

Apollo's Dream II is now live!
A ton of work went into this one, I hope everyone will enjoy it.
Creating beauty with Unity for a Virtual Experience with an original soundtrack is a lot of fun and I hope it shows in the video.

Sectr is used to create a large environment for this old west experience. I'm still learning this tool, but it is a life saver!
Thank you PW for keeping this asset alive!

 

Gaia Pro just released a 2021 upgrade. Is something similar coming for SECTR?

 

Does Procedural Worlds died and nobody notice?

 

You will probably have to get them on discord. They aren’t in the forums very often.

 

Currently, we are working on other development so Sectr is just getting the normal bug fixing etc. There isn't a confirmed upgrade at this time.