4 ms·

Obviously doesn't apply to infinite or "practically" infinite scenarios (like ED) I was under the impression that landscapes are generally not that costly in te

Obviously doesn't apply to infinite or "practically" infinite scenarios (like ED) I was under the impression that landscapes are generally not that costly in terms of storage. AFAIK with systems like Unreal's landscape feature, the landscape is not stored to disk as meshes, instead the heightmap and layer masks (for terrain coloration) are stored as textures which are looked up at runtime in order to render the landscape. Would assume this means its relatively lightweight to store large amounts of terrain to disk compared to storing it as textured meshes. The only scenarios where this wouldn't be true is if your landscape texture is for example satellite imagery instead of a combination of texture samples blended together at runtime with masks. With Unreal Engine 5's Nanite there is also the the baked Hierarchical Level of Detail meshes which would add to the storage cost. Notably landscape is excluded from Nanite since the path Epic wants to go down is to continue generating landscape mesh at runtime. Would love to get some more insight into landscapes in general in game engines :)

jdmichal 5y ago
Probably relevant to note that Minecraft stores the entire chunk once it's generated. (Of course it has to -- it's malleable.) And that's a lot more information than a height map and texture. It looks like Star Citizen did something like procedural planet generation at different levels of detail depending on the camera. I'm assuming with a chosen, stable seed. And then a combination of randomly- and purposely-placed distribution of assets on the planet.
- wlesieutre 5y ago
  Star Citizen does the textures in Substance Designer, I would guess they're included in the game files and not regenerated at runtime. I believe in addition to the terrain height/color maps, they generate textures that feed into object scattering so that rocks/trees/etc can be designed into the environments by the artists, but regenerated clientside to avoid needing to store millions of rock locations. The low detail "from space" version used to be painted separately and then blend into the ground detail as you approach, but I believe the space view and the ground ecosystem mapping come off of the same map now. EDIT: here's the video I'm remembering from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfCc_aDNsAw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfCc_aDNsAw Whatever you think of the future prospects of the project, it's certainly technically interesting to keep an eye on
  - jdmichal 5y ago
    Ah, thank you. I had found the earlier 2016 video and information surrounding it, but failed to find this more recent information.
seoaeu 5y ago
Depends on the scale. It might cost on the order of several MBs to store a km^2 at a moderate level of detail. For a small area that's relatively light, but becomes prohibitively large if you multiply by the hundreds of millions of square kilometers of a planetary surface...

jdmichal 5y ago

Probably relevant to note that Minecraft stores the entire chunk once it's generated. (Of course it has to -- it's malleable.) And that's a lot more information than a height map and texture. It looks like Star Citizen did something like procedural planet generation at different levels of detail depending on the camera. I'm assuming with a chosen, stable seed. And then a combination of randomly- and purposely-placed distribution of assets on the planet.

wlesieutre 5y ago
Star Citizen does the textures in Substance Designer, I would guess they're included in the game files and not regenerated at runtime. I believe in addition to the terrain height/color maps, they generate textures that feed into object scattering so that rocks/trees/etc can be designed into the environments by the artists, but regenerated clientside to avoid needing to store millions of rock locations. The low detail "from space" version used to be painted separately and then blend into the ground detail as you approach, but I believe the space view and the ground ecosystem mapping come off of the same map now. EDIT: here's the video I'm remembering from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfCc_aDNsAw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfCc_aDNsAw Whatever you think of the future prospects of the project, it's certainly technically interesting to keep an eye on
- jdmichal 5y ago
  Ah, thank you. I had found the earlier 2016 video and information surrounding it, but failed to find this more recent information.

seoaeu 5y ago

Depends on the scale. It might cost on the order of several MBs to store a km^2 at a moderate level of detail. For a small area that's relatively light, but becomes prohibitively large if you multiply by the hundreds of millions of square kilometers of a planetary surface...