ow ow ow ow ow ah ow ow OW ow OW OW STOP ow STOP IT ow ow OW OW STOP STOP IT i just ow OW OW OW i just wanna OW i just wanna play altered beast


get a load of this idiot!!!


anyway yeah it's been a while hasn't it?? 

i haven't died!! yet!!! in fact i've even been productive!!!! absolutely crazy innit

as of late i've had a big long break and then gotten back to working on TRUCKER'S ATLAS, specifically making the world and assets to go in said world. it's been taking me a little while because uh, this place is fucking HUGE!!

so huge, in fact, i had a bit of trouble with actually finding a program that can do terrains this big.

my first port of call was unity's built-in terrain system, but as with most built-in unity things it's not great. i didn't have it set up right really either, which helped influence my decision to take things elsewhere.

next up on my list of bright ideas was to perhaps use good ol' blender for sculpting on a really big plane, but if i tried to match the same vert density as a unity terrain on the scale i wanted it would crash blender every time i tried, so this wasn't really feasible. there's almost definitely a way to do it, but i've only really used blender for weight painting rigs, so my familiarity with the program is kind of lacking.

then i looked into houdini, and the terrains houdini could produce were amazing, but there was one drawback... it can only randomly generate terrains.

they're absolutely gorgeous terrains, and there are some really powerful node-based tools, but with the lack of straight-up sculpting it just wouldn't fit my workflow. i'd absolutely recommend it if you didn't have a preset map to make, though.

i was looking into some other, really old solutions but nothing was looking good. so where did that leave me? i decided to do the unthinkable. i decided... to just try and sort the unity terrain editor out.

you see, i am a fool, and didn't have my terrains set up right. i was using a whole lot (49) of the default-size default-resolution unity terrains stitched together, because that's how it's set up by default. but i'm almost convinced that they make their default values as awful as possible, in order to force people to change them. not just for terrains, either, but with things like changing from gamma to linear colour space, or changing the fixed timestep to actually be 60fps. if it's default, change it!!!

(pictured: Exactly What I Wanted In The First Place)

so i decided to up the size/resolution to just be Exactly What I Wanted In The First Place, and it worked like a dream. big, detailed terrain, with decent sculpting tools, and i didn't even have to sacrifice my grass!! (i did anyway.) but it comes with some pretty big caveats; since i decided to use one REALLY BIG terrain and not FOUR LESS BIG TERRAINS i have a stupidly large terrain file chilling out in my game files. 121 megabytes!! i wouldn't be fussed, really, but with the source control i'm using (gitkraken) the upload limit is 120 megabytes per file...... you can see how this is a problem.

i'm stuck currently just shipping the game back and forth from school on a USB, and honestly i can live with that, but if you find yourself in a similar situation PLEASE GOD SPLIT YOUR TERRAINS UP!!! and never forget to change as many default unity settings as you can, for the most part they're garbage!! fixed timesteps, colour spaces, terrain sizes. neva 4get that

bonus screenshot because i love u


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