World Creation & Display

Alright, so this is a topic that has been plaguing me for some time now and I didn't know where else to seek input/advice/suggestions. I'll try my best to explain what I want to achieve. Basically, I would like for my players to be able to stand anywhere, and see everywhere, to achieve a sense of realism. For example, you don't stand at the top of the Eiffel tower and stare into the distance and just see nothing...you see whatever is in the distance. My game has different areas (maps). So if the player is in Town A I would like for them to face North and see the path that leads to Town B...and not just nothingness. I don't think a skybox is appropriate in this case. Here are some images to show what I mean.

This first one is standing in a field, outside of town, and as you look in the direction the town is, you see the town.


This second one is standing in that very town, and looking in the direction of that field, and you see the field.


Obviously (to my knowledge) those aren't skyboxes. Those are actual meshes in the distance. What I want to know is how to achieve this, without impacting performance. I've made an attempt by modeling a simple plane of my game's entire world, and without any details it's already at 900k tris. I was going to add minimal details to the different areas and them import the model into Unity, and only add actual details to the areas specific to the individual scenes (maps).

Is this the best way to do this, or are there better options?

 

I think you should look into Occlusion Culling and LOD to keep the mesh count as low as possible.

Also, a simple plane shouldn't be 900k tris. You can create one by going to GameObject > 3D Objects > Plane.

So with LOD you could make the cities appear far away without impacting performance much. Also look into Billboards: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/class-BillboardRenderer.html

 

The reason the plane is 900k tris is because it has been sculpted to match the map we designed. It's no longer a 2 tri plane.

And with the cities in the distance, they would definitely be minimal LOD. Never thought about billboarding distant objects, however, this wouldn't work for the terrain in the distance.

Edit - We only started the process of creating the world map as a model. We recently made some adjustments to the topology, and got the tri count down to 7.2k tris.