[RELEASED] SECTR STREAM: Seamless Scene Streaming

Ok thanks for the consideration and yes this might be a better workflow overall if SECTR is involved anyway, thinking about it. My above feature requests are around this topic, or loading a selection of sectors with one click and also transferring to the chunk scene would help make SECTR a better scene manager (an additional benefit on top of streaming

 

Yeah. You can definitely use SECTR as a workflow tool, and the Stream Window is pretty well setup to do that. You can also write custom loaders to implement loading patters that are specific to your game, like creating menus and such.

 

is there any tut. about streaming tiled terrain?

 

There's no tutorial but it's pretty easy. Just make a sector for each tile, export for streaming, and then add a region loader to the player.

 

I bought the asset and I have to say it is really good. It works perfectly, and not like others in the market.

I have several doubts that I am sure have a solution but that I am not able to find. Let's see if you can help me:

- It is a car racing game (RALLY)
- I use other assets like EASYROAD, VEGETATION STUDIO.
- I have created 16 divisions of land of 1024 x 1024.
- The loader I use is the REGION LOADER. I have modified its configuration several times and now I have it in 1100 x 100 x 1100.
- I have made the lighting as indicated in the manual. There are 16 files LightingData-xx


Problems.

- When the scenes are loaded, a "lag" occurs.
- Lighting is also lost. I attach photos with the correct light and light after loading a new scene.
- In the scenes there are signs, public ..., etc. Those who have "rigidbody" appear fallen or simply do not appear. Those that do not have it (like "speedtree" trees) appear in their correct place.

I am sure that everything can be solved in a simple way and that it is my fault for not understanding the manual well.

Thank you very much in advance.


Light Without Stream


Light With Stream

 

Your setup sounds good overall.

Regarding "lag" during tile loads, that's always worst in editor . Make sure to test it in a standalone build. If you see lag in standalone it's likely some script code. You can use the profiler to see what's causing the hitch.

Regarding baked lighting, you have to bake it at the master scene level using the SECTR stream window. Baking lighting in individual scenes will cause problems.

For the rigid bodies, generally they should be in the sector chunk for the title . If that's the case they'll be created at the same time as the ground and not fall through. If that's not workable for you, then you can try adding the hibernator component to them.

 

Hello
I am considering buying your asset. I am developing iOS game with open city to explore (I aim to support up from iPhone 6). Currently when I load whole city to memory it takes more than 1GB RAM, which is quite large number for mobile device). Does your asset work well with eg. streaming buildings and trees around the player? Like, you walk, and buildings behind you are getting unloaded, and those in front of you are loaded?
Can you give me some watermarked version of your asset to try it out if it works for me? Because I don't want to spend money if I don't know if it helps me Best regards

 

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'm setting up SECTR Stream in a fairly simple way: I have two big complicated rooms, with a stairway connecting them. So I have three sectors: Room 1, Stairs, and Room 2. I've set up to portals, which connect Room 1 to Stairs, and Stairs to Room 2.

Two problems:

1) Room 2 is loaded at runtime If I go through the level, then Room 1 is unloaded at the correct time (when crossing through the second portal), but I can't figure out why Room 2 is loaded at runtime. This happens if I set the Neighbor_Loader's Max Depth to zero as well as 1.

2) Build size is vastly inflated by "File Header" which is over 5 GB. (Build before adding SECTR was 1.5 GB). What can I do about that?

thanks
Dave

 

I'm having a bit of a problem with Sectr Stream with real time global illumination.

I have a scene with a number of sectors. I import all of the sectors and then generate lightmaps. After baking and exporting, I seem to only get GI color from my sky, not my directional light. Selecting indirect scene view mode reveals this.

If I import a sector and then hit play, the directional light contributes to the indirect lighting correctly. But, if I export / revert the sector and press play again, the directional light no longer affects GI in the sector when it is loaded by my SECTR_Loader.

Also maybe of note is if I load one of the sector scenes by itself and add a directional light, it contributes to the indirect lighting correctly. If I save the directional light in that sector and attempt to play in my main scene without pre-importing the sector, none of the directional lights contribute to GI.

Any thoughts on what might be causing my directional light to not contribute to GI if I do not pre-import sectors into my scene?

Here is the indirect lighting of what the scene looks like if I hit play with the sector already imported. This is what it is supposed to look like.


Here is the indirect lighting in the scene if I hit play without the sector imported through the SECTR Stream window. The blue color is from my sky, but there is no orange from light bounced from my directional light.

 

1) Try setting portal determined to be true in the member component next to the neighbor loader. By default members are in all sectors that they overlap, but this will make it so that they only change sectors when crossing through a portal.

2) I'm really not sure what's going on here and have never heard of it before. It might be a unity regression? Have you tried posting a general unity question? Ultimately SECTR is just creating seb scenes nd us the MSE APIs to manage them.

 

Getting light baking and streaming on unity is super tricky. The best approach I've seen is to actually export all of your sectors and then press the bake lighting button in the SECTR stream window. That should work correctly. Can you give it a try and see if it works?

 

When I use OC I tend to import all the chunks in before I bake. Maybe this will apply to lighting, so if export only works - no problem, if not import them all in first before baking, then revert them back after, before pressing play or creating a build.

 

Thanks, that did the trick!

The huge File Headers was apparently somehow caused by the LightingData file, so I'm working on that separately, nothing to do with SECTR, sorry for the false alarm.

 

@MakeCodeNow, did you see my post or private message?

 

Sorry, got lost in the shuffle.

If you want an eval copy you'll need to email the support for Procedural Worlds (linked from the publisher page).

 

This worked. Thank you for the help!

 

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.

 

Purchased SECTR Complete. I am really looking forward to being able to create bigger worlds to run around in. The vegetation studio integration also sounds really cool as it is an outstanding product.

 

Is there anything that would make writing my own world recentering code a non-starter? Or anything specific to SECTR that I would have to watch out for?

 

None that I am aware of. We would like to introduce this into SECTR itself, but not sure of what ETA is yet.

 

Hey I wanted to grab sectr stream on the summer sale but before that I need to know whether or not portals also work with 2D objects having 2D physics in a 2D world

Otherwise I would need to stick to making my own open world streaming tool

 

Hi Tom. Are you the same guy I spoke with in Discord earlier tonight? If not, let me know. Sounds like same issue but different name in Discord if so.

Let us know!

 

Yup, but I didn't know my bugged discord invitation to the Sectr server gave me acess to the Procedural Worlds server when I wrote this. Sorry for the confusion but I couldn't seem to find a way for changing my profile name to "Xrenyn the GameMage" in the Unity forums until just now. And even that doesn't seem to work that well...

 

No worries! Glad you found us there! I'm not really sure how you would change it and not really sure you need to. I just wanted to make sure you were the same person so we didn't miss helping someone. I know that Frank, one of our developers, had more questions for you to better understand your use case since it appears to be kind of unique from others we have seen since taking over the product.

 

Hey, just a quick couple questions that I haven't managed to find an answer to, does the STREAM asset work in a local co-op situation where both players can go off into different locations? And would the STREAM and VIS assets play well together in that circumstance as well?

So far I've made my own system that additively loads the scenes adjacent to each entity but I get the feeling your solution may be more robust.

 

It's local to each user, you could have a region loader attached to the player which will load everything within the defined box area, with a low poly version you could have a proxy mesh leave behind an empty shell of a building so you would still see it at a greater distance than what your region loader shows.. so you can strip out any colliders, interiors unless you have AI in them, just keep it basic until you are within viewing distance. Everything that you do network side would just keep track of positions and actions. To go a step further than a proxy for even greater distances to reduce memory consumption and increase fps you could leave behind an Impostor (maybe look at Amplify) for this - but you'd need to make a custom change to the code. Only ideal if you have an open world.

 

Thanks for the reply, however in this instance I'm not using any networking, strictly local. A more specific question would be can the asset function properly in a 2 player local co-op game where both players are playing on the same computer simultaneously? They are at times in the same game location and other times in completely separate locations. How AI etc function in unloaded locations is not an issue but I appreciate the insight.

 

ahh I see, I assumed you were using a LAN with two machines. Not so sure, but I'd imagine that frame rates would be an issue, as you'd be loading/unloading on two players. What you could do is setup two controllers in the game and spawn them a distance apart, it would probably make them move at the same time as the input references would be the same and see what the results are, then work on separating the inputs (assuming you've not already done this). Making sure they both have loaders on them.

 

I recently testing two player split screen and it does work but as @julianr guessed, it cut performance in at least half because you are essentially running the client for two people. The other person who asked about this, did so in the thread for Sectr Complete (which includes Sectr Stream). Here are the results of my test which I posted there in response.

 

Hey Shawn67, thanks for taking the time to post your results.

I've built my game from the ground up as a local 2 player type thing, so far it's pretty well optimized for that. My current method is essentially updating 2 arrays of required levels upon a player entering a room, the arrays are combined and compared against the currently loaded levels, then it loads and unloads based on that comparison. The game environment is all inside one large building and the "levels" are essentially rooms and corridors, all fairly predictable with regards to resources.

I'll keep going as I am for the moment, though I may give Sectr a try down the road when I optimize further.

 

SECTR should work fine for this use case. It uses additive loading under the hood, so if your current solution is performant then most likely SECTR will be, too.

 

Hello,
We just purchased the SECTR suite, and I have a couple questions about the stream portion of the extension.

1. Does SECTR stream divide the main scene into other scenes, and then load/unload them based on the cameras location? I ask, because of Unity's 4gb texture limitation per scene. I was hoping that SECTR would be a good work around (as long as each chunk is a new scene, it should divide the texture limitations between the scenes).

2. If our game consists of three giant "levels", can I stream each of them? Or, does everything have to be in one scene, and then streamed via SECTR? Again, we have three very large levels, therefore, three scenes. I need to know this for setup. I just finished out the first level/scene.

3. Has anyone tested SECTR with Bakery (A GPU lightmapper).

Thank You.

 

Hi,

I came across this asset recently and I would like to know if it will work for my use case.

I am working on a procedural virtual universe game, where players can explore space, land on planets, etc. I already have a floating origin and spherical terrain system implemented.

The problem I am having is that I have a lot of complex objects stored in prefabs, such as, for example, space stations and ships with multiple rooms, lights, interior decorations, etc, etc.

Using instantiate causes a stutter of 3-4 seconds, which is unacceptable, so what I am doing now is creating all of these objects at load time, then disabling and re-enabling them when they are needed.

This obviously has huge memory requirements, and is not a good solution.

Is it possible to use SECTR to load a specific, complex, prefab with many nested objects from disk and render it on screen without any stuttering or freezing in unity?

I haven't been able to do this with loadassetasync, loadlevelasync, etc, so if SECTR can do this, you have a customer!

 

This is my current problem, huge scene for mobile.. Answer depends on streamed scene size with all objects and hardware device..

For example, 300k vertices scene with iphone 5 shutters like 1 sec, iphone 6s less..

It is less ideal for ongoing game play, but it better for level to level loading..

If you can find solution please let me know, i am having memory issues due to huge open wolrd, and looking for solutions..

 

SECTR uses additive async level loading internally so it's unlikely to fix your problem if you've already tried to use it yourself.

I recommend you try additive async loading again but use the profiler to see what's going on while the stutter happens. It may well be something you can fix, like having too much script logic in Start/Awake/OnEnable.

 

A quick question

Unity manul says;
Known issues

• Cross-Scene references are not supported, and are prevented in Edit mode. In Play mode they are allowed, because Scenes cannot be saved.

So in play mode I have an object in Scene1, and load Scene2, have reference to that object from Scene1, then unload Scene2 and load back Scene2 again, will reference will stay in Scene2 ? ( without effected unload operation )

 

Pretty sure it will not be preserved. Basically references are only between game objects that are in memory at the same time (and in the same scene in the editor). Unity doesn't have any mechanism to preserve references across loaded and unloaded scenes.

 

Ok, I see

Can I have find and have reference to specific objects from loaded additive scene to my main scene ? ( MainScene searches some objects from additive Scene1 which is loaded now )

 

Yeah. That's pretty much the only option and as you can imagine there are more and less efficient ways to do that.

 

Hi,

Thank you for your reply.

I ran the profiler, and I saw a large spike when the prefab was loaded. It seems that the culprit was GC.collect, which I'm assuming is not related to onenable()?

I could try again with the scripts disabled, to double check, but I suspect that this approach might not work.

 

It sounds like your app is generally generating too much garbage. Garbage collection is run periodically, and can often happen after a large amount of allocations (e.g. an additive level load). I suggest you use the profiler to figure out which scripts are generating garbage and then fix them so that they don't. Your overall performance will likely increase and you'll probably see much less, if any, hitching when doing additive level loads.

 

Hi, I am using sector stream and manually load / unload level scenes

yield return new WaitUntil (() sectorChunk.IsLoaded() == true) to make sure sector chunk loaded before proceding any more scripts, however IsLoaded() method most of time works, but sometimes returns false even if the scene loaded that I can see, is this a bug ? I check debug inspector it says LoadState = loading however, I can see the scene added to main scene..

Or sectrChunks are like target = Instantiate(gameobject), which means target has his reference %100 before proceeding next line of script.. As long as I tested, loading takes time and next scripts executes...

Is there a way to be ensure additive scene %100 loaded, then we can proceed next line of scripts..


Final: I think I found the problem, I do Time.timeScale = 0 after level completed and then remove additive scene, I see the sector chunk need FixedUpdate the complete loadstate process. Is there way not to use FixedUpdate or force it manually, etc..

 

Thank you for your reply.

This is certainly possibly, I haven't fully optimised my project yet.

However, I tried running the garbage collector manally ( System.GC.Collect(), which ran with no stuttering or issues, but did cause a spike in the profiler.

When I loaded in scene using loadsceneasync, I got a much smaller spike in the editor, but I still got a few seconds of stuttering. My scene also has all objects disabled, so onenable(), onwake(), etc, shouldn't be called.

So, really I'm just pulling in a scene with a single prefab and a lot of art objects within that prefab, all disabled, after running the garbage collector first. Could this be an issue that is fixable?

I would very much like to use sectr stream if I can.

 

In general you should profile streaming in standalone, not the editor as unity disables various streaming options in editor.

If even then you see issues with asynx loading please try to capture a load in the profiler and still down to see if you can find out where the time is going.

 

If you want you can add a public forced update function which just calls fixed update. That should work fine

 

Can you load Chunks from a web server? I tried reading the API but didn't see any references.
I'm looking to host the Chunks for easy updating remotely.
Do you support that?
If I have to use Asset Bundles for Scenes, it seems like even more work to add Sectr into that process.
Thoughts?

 

That is currently not supported. I'm also not sure if that would be a good way to keep the game updated, since it would require a constant internet connection while playing just for the update mechanism (as long as you don't require that anyways). And you would need to keep track somewhere which chunk has already been updated and which not, unless you want to re-download each chunk every time it loads.

 

I am trying SECTR Stream for the first time in a test scene using Unity 2018.3.0f2

I have setup my Sectors and Portals as shown in the "QuickStart" video, but I am getting an error.
When I attempt to "Export" a single sector or "Export All Sectors" I get the below exception and the export stop midway through the process.

"InvalidOperationException: Destroying a GameObject inside a Prefab instance is not allowed."

Upon closed inspection this occurs in the SECTR_StreamExport.ExportToChunk() method when the code at Line 344 (see below) is called for a GameObject that is based on a prefab.
GameObject.DestroyImmediate(transform.gameObject);

Is this an issue with the new prefab Workflow in 2018.3?