[Unity 4] Please don't cap terrain size, i'm ok if it performs much worse!

Is there any reason heightmap resolution is capped at 2049? Because 2049 seems to give me "okish" look so 8K would definately be fine on a single terrain and i'd be just fine with the memory usage being 16X as high.
Can't you simply unlock it and put a warning messagebox stating it could be slow? I don't see any technical reason why it should require any change to support higher resolutions?

 

Rather than going above 2049 you should add more than one terrain and set them to be smaller. When I'm doing endless terrains I usually use many terrains of 512 or smaller. That makes dynamic adding and removing terrains much faster.

As usual I'll recommend TerrainEdge 3 that has its own forum thread here.

Its not the most user friendly tool, but most questions have already been answered in the thread. And it have lots of functionality including automatic setup of neighboring Terrains and linking them to avoid seams.

 

But i'm not doing endless terrains, while i know there are workarounds i'd rather have the capability built in (i already have a tiling terrain mechanism working, but i always keep all terrains at pixel error 1 with full shader activated at ok performance, so i see no reason for having the hard workflow of multiple terrain if i end up using them as a single one! 2048 is way in the past in this era of 1GB+ vidcards and 8GB+ computers and since i switched to DX11 that's the low end of my targets by the time i release)

 

TerrainEdge 3 is great but is not anymore updated for a long time, hope too unity gets some attention to terrain features.

 

Aye and i really can't believe this would be any harder than removing an if that was there to safeguard you against yourself, back in a time when >2K was considered unreasonable.

 

Unity 4.0 is feature locked, meaning we will not change this for 4.0. I can't even make promises when something like this will be implemented. We are looking into how to improve our terrain solution but its open ended R&D without a set release target. So my advice right now would be to make multiple terrains and work around this limitation.

I'm aware that TerrainEdge 3 has not been updated for a while, it doesn't have support for the new features of 4.0, but I still think its an awesome resource.

 

UE imposes stiff limits as well, the limits aren't just about "size" but about ram as well, and draw calls. You can easily have terrains blow up in your face, and if you're going that far it's maybe time for custom solutions. Just playing devil's advocate here rather than beating up on unity all the time.

Since you seem to not care that much about limitations, it might be an idea to investigate 2048 being as big as a country, but using tessellation shader / DX11 - or similar idea? just thinking out loud.

 

I know, but the issue is that i'm fine with the large ram usage, every double of heightmap is 4X the ram only, and i'd happily use 16X the current ram. For all other features you can do as you wish and if performance sucks, you can fallback, so i don't see why it should be any diferent here. I'm not beating on unity, i perfectly understand why the limitation was there, i just think 4.0 might be the time to lift it and, while i understand the concept of feature locked, it does seem like (unless they really have code that breaks past 2K) a very trivial fix, probably removing a simple if safeguard.
I would've agreed with custom solutions, and i already have that in place, except my testing reveals the non custom solution should perform just fine at those sizes (extrapolating here, could be wrong), so it's always best to use native instead of workaround when native could do the job.
I'm probably going with multiple terrains unless this gets hotfixed, tesselation is cool and all that, but it still seems like i'd have the burden of handling collision detection if i used it, and it won't automagically place the trees and vegetation according to it, so it sounds like quite a lot of work there Multiple terrains will do but i feel sad about using that, without even using the performance (all will be seen always with pixel error 0, and it performs just fine) this is why i really wish they'd unlock this feature, because the feature seems to be ready for it (unless somehow 4X 2048 with pixel error 0 performs better than 1X4096, but i can't see why).