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Terrain expectations

Discussion in 'World Building' started by douglassophies, Oct 12, 2018.

  1. douglassophies

    douglassophies

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    (Moved from https://forum.unity.com/threads/terrain-expectations.568249/)
    I have a couple of questions about what to expect from the new terrain.
    1) Will it ever be possible to change the terrain size without it scaling the whole terrain? For example if i move from 500 to 400 wide and the last 1/5ft of the terrain had a hill on it, i would want that hill to disappear rather than having the map scale down to keep the hill but make all the terrain features squished in by 1/5ft. Would be handy if i could choose which side of the square terrain to shrink down so i have control over what is being deleted. Dragging a side of the square terrain in the editor could also let me create new flat terrain.
    2) If that cannot/wont happen then i have another question - The add-on system that is currently in the beta means you create a lot of terrain objects which feels messy. Is there a way to combine them into one object? Perhaps that is not desirable performance wise even if it were possible?
     
    douglassophies, Oct 12, 2018
    #1

  2. ChrisTchou

    ChrisTchou

    Unity Technologies

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    Apr 26, 2017
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    1) yes, we want to support arbitrary resampling and resizing of the terrain. It needs some good controls for all of the potential options here, and handling neighbors as well.

    2) yeah, having tons of individual Terrain tile objects is something we want to move away from (aside from the clutter, it's also painful to have individual settings on every Tile, check compatibility across borders, etc), but it's difficult to do so while keeping it backwards compatible. Our current plan is to build a new Terrain editing system that appears as a single entity in editor.
     
    ChrisTchou, Oct 12, 2018
    #2
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  3. douglassophies

    douglassophies

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    Thanks for the information! Happy to hear we are on the same page about those issues.
    It sounds like the solution will take awhile to implement - maybe next year? Or do you reckon it might be in the 2018 cycle?
     
    douglassophies, Oct 13, 2018
    #3

  4. transat

    transat

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    Assuming this is a general thread about the terrain changes in 2018.3b...

    I find it mildly annoying that I can't currently change terrain layer names in the inspector. Will it be possible to rename layers soon?
     
    transat, Oct 15, 2018
    #4

  5. transat

    transat

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    And are there any plans to implement height and slope range-sliders on each terrain-layer, on top of current masking possibilities?
     
    transat, Oct 15, 2018
    #5