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

Yay !

 

Having an issue with RTP in and SECTR, when I split the terrain it loses all RTP connections. I am in version 5.1.3f of Unity, using the latest version of both sectr and RTP.

 

RTP isn't officially supported by SECTR (only Terrain Composer) but folks seem to get the best results by using Terrain Composer to create the grid then texture with RTP then sectorize that grid. Splitting a large terrain after already applying RTP will likely lose data, as you've seen.

 

Ah, alright so split it with terrain composer first? I was hoping to avoid that since it only slits it in to 4 sections when you split an existing terrain. *sigh* I guess I will go fiddle with it.

Thanks for the prompt response.

 

Yes, or use TC from the start. If you start the terrain w/ TC then you can have grids more bigger than 2x2.

 

Does this mean i can lightmap each chunk separately? and if so whats best way to approach this?
and multi sence streaming does that mean i can attach one scene to another some how?

 

You can. You use the SECTR Stream window to do the lightmapping. If you want to lightmap the entire level, press the Lightmap All button. If you want to lightmap just a single scene, select a Sector and press the Lightmap Selected button.

The core multi-scene streaming us unchanged in this release. This really just gets 5.x back to the same feature set as I had in 4.x, so all of the existing logic "just works" with these new Unity lightmap fixes.

 

core multi-scene streaming

Is that just mean the chunks after you separate or does that mean i missed a whole way to tie chunks from other scenes together?

 

I'm not sure what you mean by "tie chunks from other scenes together". Have you used SECTR stream before or are you asking for an explanation of how the streaming works in general?

 

now if sence one becomes 4 chunks and sense 2 becomes 4 chunks i'm asking can I tie all 8 together I don't think I can but just making sure.

 

Technically you can but I don't recommend or support it. You have to really know what you are doing and be able to debug the SECTR source if you make a mistake.

 

Hi
What would be the fastest way to split open 3D mesh world to small chunks (no terrain in use).Lot of small details, so it is very tedious to do it by hand. Any ideas?

 

It really depends on the scene and how you want to use it. Can you post an image of the scene or mesh(es) that you want to split?

Really, though, there is no easy way to to this. The best solution is to build it with streaming in mind, rather than trying to retrofit it afterwards.

 

Hi
It is this city with some our own add-ons.

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/17855

Have you noticed any performance increases on mobile devices with Unity 5? We are now using Unity 4.

 

If you are using that asset you shouldn't need to split things up any more than they are already are. At least start with streaming big chunks and then stream smaller chunks if/when you need to.

Unity 5 definitely has lower overhead for streaming, especially if you are not a Pro user.

 

could you please make your demo scenes NOT hide the mouse in the FPS controller. Makes trying to do anything while running your demo scenes almost impossible. Very frustrating.

 

If you press esc it'll free the mouse cursor. It may not appear unlocked until you move it or if the window but it's there.

 

does sectr support unity occlusion culling ? or the baked data is scraped when we save chunks?

 

SECTR stream does not support unity's OC because that data is fundamentally not stramable. However, SECTR includes it's own OC solution called VIS.

 

hi makecode.
im running problem trying to generate nav mesh because im using floating origin and everything get moved exept nav mesh. any idea how to solve this?
i saw https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/5982 hase somekind of system to workout floating origin problem. anyway sectr can make same?

thanks

-Toni

 

As far as I know, nav meshes are not compatible with world recentering. This is a Unity limitation, nothing to do with SECTR.

Terrain Slicing and Dynamic loaded looks like it has an option to do world recentering. I don't support that in SECTR for reasons that are described earlier in this forum and in the SECTR STREAM forum.

 

I don't know if it would help, but one thing to consider is runtime navmesh generation. There are assets for this in the store. A free one comes with RAIN, if you want to test the idea out.

 

Thanks for the ideas, but doing realtime nav mesh generation is a very large project. I doubt it'll be part of SECTR for the foreseeable future.

 

Maybe there is a misunderstanding? I meant that RAIN has a runtime navmesh generator in it, and since RAIN is free, it could be used experimentally by the customer to see if it would work for their project.

Users of another store asset - the DunGen random dungeon generator - have reported good results with making navmeshes at runtime using RAIN.

 

oh thanks for the tip. i will test later this week

edit1.
Got it working thank you hopefull!!

 

Greetings!

I have been experimenting with SECTR-Core and am seriously considering purchase of Complete. I have a question about open world behaviors that I hope you can answer.

Suppose I have an open world exterior that works similarly to your open world demo. But to this I add a cave entrance as a mesh with a hole in it that sits on the terrain (imagine it coming out of the side of a hill). I want the player to be able to enter or exit the cave seamlessly.

The way I think this could be done is to have a SECTR portal whose front and back sectors are part of different scenes. I could imagine using a short curved tunnel section that is actually duplicated in both of these scenes, but the player doesn't know that. Just as they cross the portal line, I use the early update function in Unity to move the player object to whichever scene location it should be in, then let SECTR-Stream load the needed visible objects around it.

One tricky aspect of this sort of thing is that I really don't want my interior scenes to have to be edited in the same Unity editor as a bunch of terrain...that would be an editing nightmare.

I'm also considering use of Voxeland rather than (or in addition to) Unity terrains. Same question, but different tooling.

How would you go about solving this use-case? Is there a better way? Or am I stuck with a load screen?

(Edit: This post from the Stream forum is similar to what I need to do. Can you elaborate on that, please?)

Thanks for any suggestions and info.

 

Hi. Good questions. TL;DR, SECTR STREAM exists so that you don't have to have load screens in cases like this.

One really fundamentally important thing to understand is that SECTR STREAM basically makes a level out of each Sector. However, it tries to make these subscenes a detail that you don't have to worry about. SECTR gives you tools to manage the master scene, and has logic to additively load and unload them at runtime as needed.

In the cave case, you'll want to have a master scene that includes he terrain and the cave system. However, you don't need to have it all loaded al the time. SECTR STREAM has a GUI that makes it easy to load and unload Sectors in the master scene.

In that scene you'll likely have a grid of sectors for the terrain and one or more sectors for the cave complex. You'll likely have a portal at the entrance of the cave, where one side points to the sector inside the cave and the other side points to the terrain outside the cave.

If you use Voxeland it should "just work" with SECTR, however you'll have to decide how to split up your world. SECTR includes support for splitting Unity terrains but nothing for Voxeland.

 

Good morning, and thanks for the quick reply!

How do I manage that situation at edit time, though? What if my cave is very large, and it's not practical to have the interior and exterior parts all loaded at once in Unity Editor? I'm not averse to doing some scripting if needed here, since you do provide source code and I'm an experienced programmer.

I'm investigating several possible approaches with respect to Voxeland itself. It has an option for infinite procedural terrain, but I am probably not going to use that and instead will rely on SECTR-Stream to load and unload zones of voxels. For my needs, it may actually work just fine to use regular Unity terrain for the vast majority my landscape, and make voxel objects *above* the Unity terrain for things like stone arches and small caves. There's no reason I couldn't hollow out a large basin in Unity terrain, remove its trees and grass, then fill that hole with voxels to sculpt for unusual rock formations. All of this is still very early concept thinking -- I wasn't expecting you to be able to guide me through that, but just wanted to know if there were any major minefields waiting in SECTR if I try to blend in some voxels.

Another thought that occurs is to use the voxels for *interior* zones and stick with terrains for exteriors. All of this subject to much further refinement. I'm in the early design phase here.

 

Regarding managing the scene in the Editor, that's exactly what the SECTR STREAM window lets you do. You can load and unload individual Sectors as needed. So everything is referenced from the main scene, but you only load the stuff you care about at the moment (in Editor).

Regarding Voxeland, zones (Sectors) of voxels sounds good. I think that using unity terrain for the landscape and Voxeland for caves and the like would be a winning combination and should "just work" with SECTR.

 

Sounds good, and again thanks for the reply. I have some other "unknowns" for my project, but these are all in the "nice to have" desired features list, and not critical. It sounds as if SECTR will do what I need, and I really am glad you release the source. I'm not naive enough to modify your code and break future upgrades, but for truly understanding a system nothing can compare to actually being able to examine the source code alongside the documentation.

Planning to buy your SECTR Complete for my project, rather than just Stream, because I also want the Vis component for culling.

Thanks again for the great pre-sales responses to queries.

 

I know it's early, but any assessment of how SECTR will interact with the new incremental scene loading feature in Unity 5.3? Also, does SECTR work okay with Unity 5.3 assuming I don't use that new feature yet?

 

Bump as I have the same question as syscrusher.
Also seems like someone reported an issue with SECTR stream in 5.3.1 (http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/released-sectr-stream-seamless-scene-streaming.229907/page-7).

Looks like SECTR is exactly what I'm looking for, just want to make sure its future proof before I commit.

 

@Superjayjay, so far I'm finding SECTR works the same in 5.3 as it did in 5.2. In my particular case, I have a crash issue even in the SECTR Stream demo scenes. The crash dump suggests this is a Unity bug having to do with unloading lightmaps. I've reported the problem and sent a crash dump to the Unity team, and the folks at Make Code Now have promised to work with the Unity devs to solve it together. Incidentally, I *don't* get the crash on terrains split with SECTR. So if your use-case is terrain splitting, you're probably good to go. As with any rare crash, YMMV. I'm not sure if the difference on my system is terrain vs. game object lightmaps, or if it's some other factor in the differences between my two test scenes. Your system may not see the crash problem at all.

I've been looking at the SECTR stream source alongside the new Unity APIs. In its current version, SECTR is using the backward-compatible (Unity 5.2) APIs for scene incremental load and unload. The new Unity 5.3 APIs aren't really a fundamental change, as far as I can see, just a revision of the calling syntax and finally treating a scene as a C# object rather than just data. I suspect -- but have no direct evidence -- that the Unity devs are planning to grow that API set in future engine versions. I think the changes in 5.3 were laying the groundwork for future enhancements by refactoring some code. I hope they do grow those APIs, because SECTR is in a good position to exploit any enhancements from the Unity engine's scene handling.

I'm planning to spend some further time with this over the upcoming holiday weekend and may have more to report next week. Among other things, I'm going to see if I can DIY a workaround to dodge that crash in my prototype. SECTR Stream *does* work in Unity 5.2 and 5.3 -- my crash happens after you run for a while and are swapping out sectors. My experience with the SECTR devs has been very positive so far, and I'm confident they and the Unity team will get the upstream issue sorted soon.

The other SECTR Complete features are working fine for me, by the way.

 

SECTR 1.

Hi. So sorry for the very delayed response. I somehow stopped getting notified about posts to this forum.

Anyway, I just released a new version of SECTR that uses the new 5.3 APIs but theoretically the old version would work just fine as in 5.3 they map the old APIs to the new ones.

 

Sorry for the very slow reply. I'm not aware of any issues in 5.3.1 in the latest version of SECTR, but if you want to try it out, email support@makecodenow.com for a trial.

 

Thanks for all the detailed info, here and in email. Check out the latest version of SECTR to see if it helps with your issues.

I've escalated the crash bug in lightmap unloading to Unity, but so far haven't gotten a clear indicator when it'll be fixed...

 

I

I just updated to the new version of sectr and vis works perfectly. Thanks for the quick fix

 

Hooray!

 

It's possible to use sectr to make a terrain (or a mesh) loop? I'm thinking on combining SECTR with CurvedWorld to make a seamless planet. Could be with 4 planes though.

 

If you build a spherical world, SECTR can stream the pieces no problem. However there's nothing in SECTR that will auto loop terrain ala an infinite runner.

 

Oh, okay. Thank you for the quick answer.

 

is it possible to get information about in what sector player is currently in?
i try to make some scripts that need to know what sector is currently loaded

thank you

 

So now that Unity 5.3 has multi-scene editing and a scene manager for streaming scenes in/out, how does SECTR Stream compare? I've had my eye on SECTR for a while now and I definitely want to get SECTR Audio, but I'm wondering if Stream is still a "must have" now that 5.3 is out. Any information you can give on the advantages/disadvantages of using SECTR Stream over the Unity 5.3 capabilities would be much appreciated.

 

Yes. It's very easy. You just put a SECTR_Member component on the object and then check the Sectors property. That will give you a List of all the Sectors that Member is in.

 

Good question! There are two important aspects of streaming: 1) authoring and 2) loading.

Unity 5.3 MSE definitely gives you much better tools for the authoring side, but it doesn't really fully work for authoring a streaming game. MSE allows you to add sub scenes, but they aren't saved in any way. That means that you have to manually add subscenes every time you open the master scene. SECTR handles all of that for you.

On the loading front, Unity doesn't really do anything more than it used to do. It's still up to you to call LoadLevelAdditiveAsync, UnloadLevel, etc. SECTR does all of that "out of the box", with components that support common patterns like open world terrain and indoor rooms.

 

Thanks for the information. It definitely helps.

 

Hi,

Are there any screenshots or web demos of the demo scenes that come with the current version of Sectr complete?

Is this web player demo scene included?

thanks,

 

I need to be enlightened. It don't seem like Sectr actually does too much. Makes it so you can put the player one place or the other. It seems like you must make a hallway too. I don't understand. ?? It just seems like it kind of makes a level..which isn't earth shattering.

 

Did you look at the docs? Which Sectr product did you install? If you have Sectr Complete (which is the version this thread is for), it does a LOT. But you really need to read the docs to understand what to do. Sectr has nothing to do with making levels. The various components of sectr let you divide up your terrain to help deal with performance issues you might normally have without it. I've only played with the Sectr Stream component of Sectr Complete at this point, so not really sure how to describe all the rest of them. But if you go out to their website and watch the videos / read the information and then read documentation, it should be a big help.

 

There are some demos and videos on sectr.co. If you want to try out the latest, email support@makecodenow.com for an eval copy.