The Secret to Great Terrain on Mobile

Thanks

Yeah, to do it properly i should link the ground texture with the corresponding vegetation type, but i kind of just work messy - i find it doesnt really hamper the overall "feel" that youre in a real natural place but it is possible to do and would make things seem more consistent as vegetation appears in front of you over the terrain.

 

By the way, here's the alpha teaser for Nimian Legends Vandgels.

 

thanks for the reply. well my device is 4.4 with open gl es 3.0 and 1gb ram. so i'm not allowed to even install. but i test it on someone else device with open gl es 3.1 and hexa core adreno processor on medium setting. can you tell what post fx i can use?
i wanna have fog, bloom , tonemapper and color grading. they are high on my list.

 

Do you mean in your game? BrightRidge has bloom, fog and color rading no problem. I am sure you could add a tonemapper too (i just didnt like how it looked on my phone).

What i suggest is adding in ALL the post fx you want because they dont really have much effect until you turn them on. Give your players the options to turn them on and off as they like. There really isnt one set amount of things you can put in any game because there are too many mobile devices, so its nit like developing for a PS4 where its the same every time.

You really need to just gove a lot of options to customize and test and also understand that you cant please everyone and that here will be crashes or cases where thing dont always work. But i think that's part of the challenge, and also if you are making a game because you believe in it and not just for money then there are other important things that become part of the pleasure of making games

 

i hope that i'm not wasting any of your time. but i'm really trying hard to get a beautiful looking terrain on phone. i tried going from 128 to 1024.
like height map will be 128 with pixel error of 5 etc.
there is one thing. i dont understand after i add vegetation my frame goes to 4fps from 60fps even on 3gb ram device.

right now i'm not creating any game, i just wanna explore a beautiful world and wander around. i'm more of an artist than a programmer. i spend most of my time creating terrains.
oh one more thing i using map magic for terrain, detail, vegetation
thank you

 

i tried map magic and its great - i love the Nodes way of building things. I also use World Creator and terrain composer.

There was a bug in Unity 4 when you added even a single tree the frame rate would go super low. They fixed it but im mentioning it in case.

what i do is iterate - try just a plain terrain, then add just grass. then add ONE tree and check performance at each step

Put your pixel error to the highest and go down from there.

Check the release notes of the version you use to see if theres any bugs. All my IOS 8 builds were pink with Unity 5.6.3p4 - thought i was crazy then found out it was a bug.

and make sure about maxmesh trees being a low number like 16 and play with your billboard settings for tree distance.

 

i'm very thankful to you for helping us. yesterday, i play Z.O.N.A on android and it's really polished and made with unity. they have everything like fog , bloom, but more important thing i still dont know they were using terrain or meshes? performance wise is still good. i always target for 30fps so i able to play on high settings. i only wonder how they managed to put all together? i also wonder how gameloft developer build their game ? i'm sure you have already played gangstar vegas or asphalt 8 on ios. well your nimian legends has everything i want. i enjoy your game.
Map magic is super great because of its infinite terrain and its light weight. world creator is also cool but its heavy. i dont use terrain composer because i'm still a noob to learn that tool. for learning map magic it took me so many hours to watch the same tutorial 100 of times. nimian legends is your first game ? or you have already create other games. sorry i don't know much.
thanks again

 

Happy to help a bit

I have another game on android called Plum Nut - its free

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.protopop.plumnut&hl=en

Its all about collecting notes to play a song from the nutcracker - kind of conceptual and sold nothing, but it has a special place in my heart Plus there is a new game called Vandgels coming, and another free one on IOS only though called Zymbols that is a puzzle matcher.

 

Hi guys, long ago I gave up on the idea of having terrain for Android. But I got new Android phone Moto g5 s plus ( 4gb ram octa core processor with adreno 506 and open gl 3.2 with AEP capability) so I again try unity terrain and voila. Everything works fine. I had 128k resolution heightmap with 512k texture also I did some changes in quality setting. I'm just posting here to tell that now we can have terrain based game on Android

 

Im glad to hear that And that is a great phone. Keep it up!

 

I'm still having a lil problem with render thread. I always keep terrain triangles at 95k - 100k but I also want bloom color grading, sun shafts , and time of day. It's get really slow why? You have everything in your game brightridge. I also tried to convert terrain to mesh. I get better performance if I have only time of day or a single directional light with default skybox. One more thing why I'm not able to get sunshaft effect or depth of field in your game ? My phone is capable of but still I'm not able to get that option. Thank you for appreciation.

 

The Unity depth of field and sun shaft filters i use dont work on android, so i have to find versions that do

The default skybox is performance heavy. Try using a skybox made of images.

increase the pixel error of your terrain to get a visual downgrade a bit but a big performance boost.

I just keep working on each part of my game and trying to improve it, i suggest the same for you - just pick one part like you have been doing and test, test, test All your little improvements will add up to a faster game over time so dont lose hope.

 

Ive been looking for something like this for a while, I tried it and it doesn't actually produce the effect shown, has something changed in unity?

 

I figured it out pretty much and made a video tut

 

wow - thats elaborate nice work.

yeah, basically reflection probes have to be touching the thing they are making reflective, or attached in some way.

I actually removed my puddle reflections in the unity 5.6 update because everything was getting reflection probe "shine" on it. Im still trying to figure out how to make a reflection probe affect only a few objects and not everything - like puddles on terrain and not the terrain itself.

 

Hi could you tell me about how you bake your 2k terrain at once? i'm struggling to bake my 2k terrain with some object on the terrain. thank you

 

I dont bake anymore, i use realtime lights. The baking was taking too log. This might be better now that unity offers the progressive lightmapper options as well as enlighten.

 

performance cost of realtime lights for android?

 

Thanks for starting this thread. Some great info here.

 

Hi can you tell me the size of your terrain like width and height of the terrain .I'M trying to create biomes with 4 terrain tile each 1k size terrain with 257 heightmap resolution so it count 2k size terrain for all biome together and it's help to maintain fps .but I'm having problem with terrain height. Can you guide me in the right direction .thank you.

 

@protopop, your work is absolutely amazing!

I'm curious whether you've gotten into VR development (particularly "mobile VR", i.e. Oculus Go) yet. Given what you were able to achieve on an iPhone 4s, I'd think your techniques would work there too — and they would blow away any other game I've seen on that platform.

 

Looking for VR terrain optimisation tips from this also, would be curious to see any works on this

 

Hi can you tell me what exact asset for trees and grass you are using in your game. I'm trouble finding conifer tree for mobile. Thank you. And for grass are they meshes or grass textures?

 

I can’t remember but I think it was something by Dexsoft - they have assets on the asset store - and the grass is textures

 

Thank you. Because I'm not able to find conifer or pine for mobile. I will look in Dex soft.
What dynamic sky? you do use. And microsplat performance? I read your post in microsplat forum for android.

 

If you are talking about the initial screenshots in this thread.
I believe they are from this Asset - https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/environments/nature-pack-mobile-12028

If not, they look pretty close!

Good luck

 

thank you.

 

@protopop
I keep coming back to this thread for tips on how to optimise for mobile. I hope one day to achieve what you've done with Nimian Legends (gorgeous btw!). I've tried on a AR bubble popping game of mine but feel like I always have to scale back for performance reasons... Anywho, I've had Brightridge on Iphone and Android for some time and just picked up Vandjels. I find it inspirational! My mind is still boggled at how you've created such epic stuff on mobile! Honestly, if anyone wants to see what is really possible with mobile you should check them out! Thanks again for the tips!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.protopop.vandgels&hl=en_US
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nimian-legends-brightridge-hd/id1021026309

 

This is an outstanding guide for optimizing your projects for mobile.
https://developer.arm.com/docs/100140/latest

 

@protopop hi there. Hope you are doing good in this pandemic. I've always been a fan of your game 'Nimian legends' . So do you further improve the game ? Learned some other method to optimize? Well I want to know if you ever tried to use RTP shader on terrain? I know it's heavy but it will work with terrain mesh where microsplat doesn't support it natively.

Also what do you think ? Streaming terrain tiles is better or streaming mesh terrain would be a better option?
Good luck. Take care

 

I haven't used mesh terrains because I like the benefits that unity terrain goes us - grass, trees, easy modelling etc. To me a mesh terrain feels more like a frozen in space asset, while unity terrain feels more like clay - something you can mold

 

Microsplat supports mesh terrains fine with its mesh terrain module. https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/terrain/microsplat-mesh-terrains-157356

 

I agree with Protopop ... I always use a terrain but for distance, I use meshes....when streaming. So for distance maps you want to use LP meshes, but for the rest use Unity terrain and stream it. with tiles.

 

@protopop hi I played your new game wilderLess. It's really awesome. I've been trying to use urp but couldn't get it to work without bug. But I want to know if you use any of this asset plugins in your latest game. Microsplat? Map magic? I really love the way you give us the option to customize almost everything. How did you do that? Did you script all of the UI options ? Hope you are doing good. Thank you