What assets would you grab to make an open world game?

Hey everyone,

Hypothetically speaking, if you wanted to make a Bethesda type game what assets would you grab?

Oh, and if you've made one of these assets please feel free to put in your own two cents.

Here's a list that of assets I'm looking at:
World Machine ($250) OR Gaia ($45) OR World Composer ($45) and Terrain Composer ($45)

Erosion Brush ($35)

RTP ($60)
Horizon[ON] ($35)

Sky Master ($90)
Time of Day ($60)

SUIMONO ($65)

InfiniGrass ($60) OR DirectX 11 Grass Shader ($20)
Advanced Foliage Shader ($20) OR

Skyshop ($95)
Shader Forge ($90)
UBER - Standard Shader Ultra ($50)

Terrain Slicing & Dynamic Loading Kit ($45) OR World Streamer ($40)

Camera Filter Pack ($50)

NGUI ($95)

UFPS ($95)

Multiple Speed Tree Packages (~$160 each)
Speed Tree ($75 a month)

Easy Scatter ($10)

Easy Roads ($45)

Stitch Scape ($5)

Automatic LOD ($90)

Volumetric Fog & Mist ($45)

What would you guys use?

 

Do any of the above provide a 64 bit world transform system that works with Unity?

 

You're stuck on this aren't you. Just at a glance both world streaming assets appear to handle floating origin for you.

 

Because I believe it would be best included in the heart of the Unity engine.

 

World Machine has a fair amount of popularity but you'll still want to texture and populate the terrain. If I recall correctly from back when I first looked into it Gaia can handle these for you.

Why not use Unity's UI?

I'd recommend an actual spline asset like Mega Shapes ($100). You can use it for more things.

 

IDK, I guess cause all the cool kids use it. But yeah, it is an extravagance.

That's a good idea. Thank you.

 

By the way there is another asset by the same author called Mega Fiers ($150) that is related to mesh deformation. It has a basic tier of Mega Shapes included, as mentioned by the author, to allow it to function. If the basic tier features mentioned are all you need it may be another alternative.

Some of the examples (especially the scroll and book ones) showcased on the store page could fit right in.

 

The cool kids are mostly using the in built tools these days. NGUI basically only exists to support existing projects and workflows. As I understand it it doesn't offer much in terms of better functionality. Just a slightly different approach. The same coder worked heavily on both systems.

 

Ya save the money and just use Unity native UI. No need to purchase ngui anymore.

 

Use Easy Roads instead of Megashapes. Megashapes/Megafiers is more for when the splines you define, define the level, while Easy Roads is created to work like an addendum to a level. Easy Roads 2.5.8 (beta 3) is out now.

 

To supplement that list:

World Streaming
For world streaming, if you do the floating point origin recenter yourself, SECTR Stream is another good choice.


UI
DMMap is a good minimap solution.
Easy HUD WayPoint


Data
Inventory Pro
Easy Save


NPCs
Presumably you'll have people in your world, so include something like: Ubrin, Morph3D, UCC, or UMA, where you can use the same model and just morph and texture swap to create lots of characters without using a lot of memory.

And if they speak, something like SALSA or FaceFX. (There are also some decent dialogue & quest systems on the store. )

And something like Behavior Designer for general NPC AI, and Emerald AI for animals.


Level Design
Instant Good Day is another good choice for day/night cycles, or consider something like UniStorm for complete weather simulation, too.

Ambient stuff: Bird Flock, Wild Life, etc.


And I always recommend uTomate for any sizeable project. It's the first thing I import into a new project.

 

See, I'm kind of torn here.

Megafiers does cleaner models and has more options.

But Easy roads smoothens out the terrain and adjusts to the road.

 

If you don't need ngui switch the budget & get both

 

I am the author of Gaia - so I am a little biased.

With Gaia you will not need any other tools for terrain generation - as it provides a huge amount of stamps (150 - just counted them all) to create all sorts of environments from rivers to mountains to mesas and hills. These can all then be rotated, scaled, and blended together to provide an unlimited set of unique terrains.

The 1.5 release of Gaia (due within the week) allows you to generate your environments - from a directed random terrain, to completely manually designed terrains - and then textures, plants, and populates it for you. You can even spawn in points of interest such as farms and villages and have them automatically placed and conforming to the terrain for you.

The downside from an open world perspective is that it does not yet support multiple tiles concurrently - but this will be the focus of version two if you can wait another month or so.

I am particularly excited by the POI spawning capability being introduced in the 1.5 release. The scenes below took literally 10 minutes to put together.

 

But you practically have to have good roads so it should be an easy choice. Easy Roads. They extra stuff with Megafiers / Megashapes you only should buy for a specific case usage besides together costing what? $250. Support is better with Easy Roads too.

 

I second the Gaia. I waited for years from Unity for something like that asset.

 

Hey there,

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*** Please don't forget to STAR rate and review 3DForge packages that you have.

Have a fabulous weekend testing your new packages

Cheers
Cobus​

 

I'd probably use some kind of voxel terrain asset so I can easily make caves and have "infinite" world (probably would put invisible walls at the edges of actual world, content-wise) and also achieve destructible terrain, so if bomb goes off enemies aren't the only thing that's affected. Seriously, apparently explosive-proof dirt, stone and other materials always bugged me in games, even when there's particle effect of dirt flying up, the actual terrain stays the same, which wouldn't be the case if real bomb would explode on a dirt field.

As for others, I'd probably use Fungus for things like dialog trees and so on and UMA for character creation. I'd also try to proceduralize as much as I can so two playthroughs, while similar wouldn't be the same (procedural locations of towns/cities except most important ones, procedural characters).

So probably would buy
- Any voxel terrain solution (there are so many of these for Unity that I don't know which one).
- Village set from post above
- ShaderForge
- UMA (for character creator and to achieve random characters, they'll be generated in similar way Rust does it)
- Cool GUI graphics (gui itself would be made using UI)
- Misc. environment items such as stones, trees, etc.

As for the rest, I'd probably will write my own inventory and game systems unless there's something I can't do with my skills (not for the lack of trying) both to minimize costs and to have complete control over those as the kind of open world game I want to make is unlike anything released to this day (though elements of it are present in various other games, not necessarily open world).

 

World machine is hands down the best terrain solution for creating terrain and texturing. If you use rtp, which you should, then creating splat maps is extremely easy. I also didn't see you put the Alloy shader framework down. That's essential for any unity game imo. We are making a Bethesda like open world game and so far we are using....
World machine
Rtp
Time of day
Alloy
Advanced foliage shader
Ceto
One of the speed tree packages
Scion
Amplify motion
Amplify color

If you want to see how these came together here is a link to some screenshots http://www.islesofarthanos.com/media

Can't think of the rest off the top of my head but those are the big ones. I wouldn't recommend the directx11 grass shader for an open world game. The iteration time for changing where grass is and any terrain adjustments makes it not very practical as a general grass solution. If you want the grass to fade properly and use the touchbending features then you need to make a copy of your terrain and turn it into a mesh, then you need to properly separate that mesh into smaller meshes and add LOD groups to each submesh to cull after a certain distance to get acceptable performance. You also need to make sure that the mesh's uvs line up correctly so that you can create splat maps from worldmachine. Now imagine having to do that process every time you want to change your terrain... Point is it's not practical. It is possible to just duplicate your terrain in the editor and then apply the shader but at the time I evaluated the project it caused obvious popping in of grass in large chunks and doesn't allow you to use the bending features and caused obvious visual artifacts of the terrains clashing at a distance. I did some research at the time and the developer pretty much said he wasn't going to or wasn't able to fix it. It is also very limited in the different kinds of grass you can have, I think the maximum number of different grasses allowed is like 4. It's not a good general use grass solution. But with having said all of that I think it could be used in smaller more enclosed environments and really be awesome.

 

@Not_Sure: Both Gaia ($29) and World Streamer ($20) are on sale at the moment.

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/sale

 

I'm not seeing anything there to make dungeons or other large indoor explorable areas. For that I'd suggest taking a look at ProBuilder. And also, the early beta of Polybrush looks pretty awesome for making organic style indoor areas (layout your cave network in ProBuilder, then add noise and an organic look using Polybrush).

Note that I haven't used Polybrush yet. I just saw the demo video yesterday and it's an ideal fit for a current project, so it has me pretty excited just because of that.

 

Problems with 32-bit floating precision which are visible to the viewer start to occur at around 10,000 units. How much better would 64-bit precision fare?

 

With a 32-bit system, the usable space within which you can move with good enough precision is about 8 km3. With a 64-bit system, the usable space increases to 8,800,000,000 km3 while maintaining satisfying precision. Or basically with 64-bit you can have an entire solar system without worrying about precision errors.

By the way these numbers were dug up from a reddit post out of laziness.

 

This was released on the asset store the other day - Dungeon Architect - looks very cool. It will do your indoor spaces, and am looking to integrate with it for outdoor spaces with Gaia.

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/53895

 

From memory it expands things out to roughly solar system scale. However, it does so at significant cost, and most games don't need it.

Even for games like the one discussed here, technical issues aside it already takes a mammoth amount of work to create enough content to fill up the area allowed without resorting to tricks with a 32bit system. And depending on the game, moving to a 64bit system might not be a clear win vs. implementing a recentering system given the costs involved - it'll depend on the game.

So while I agree it'd be neat to have as an option, I can really see why Unity haven't rushed to get it in there. Games like Kerbal Space Program already show that you can make games on that scale in Unity. Yes, it required a lot of custom work, but that's true of any technically challenging game.

That looks cool indeed! Don't need that scale of content in our project currently, but if things grow a system like that could be very handy indeed. Thanks for the heads up!

(P.S: We're also using Gaia. Thumbs up!)

 

Hey,

The Village Interiors Kit & Village Exteriors Kit are also on a -33% discount SALE for the duration of the MADNESS SALE

Cheers
Cobus

 

Heh, I saw that! I wish I had the money, but unfortunately I'm committed to finishing Bravely Bear before I move onto any other project. And it's taking me forever because I'm pulling 60 hour weeks at my job.

Damn, that's tempting though. I do like your work.