Making the player feel like the world is being generated at runtime.

[Steen]

Hello everyone I am new here and to gaia but not to unity.

I have read here that we cannot generate maps at runtime due to the fact that Gaia is dependant on many things that the unity editor provides. However, computer games are slight of hand so I was was wondering if I could, using Gena or Gaia, simply generate the minimum that is needed before doing the rest at runtime. I am curious as to what that would look like and am therefore asking here to see if someone experienced in using this software has an answer.

I am imagining that I could create a bunch of terrains with their corresponding textures etc and then at runtime select a random one of these terrains and populate it at runtime? would this possible? and how would I go about doing that? How do I store the terrains?

[Bryan]

That has been done in the past. 
However, how it was done I am not sure. 
I know Firewatch did that with Sectr and Gaia together. 

Each session has terrain data attached to it. 
In Gaia, user data is where all the save terrains would be. 
You would need to do this yourself but you could call into these terrains. 
 

[Asset Glue]

This is such a great topic. More work on generative world building in real time, that is something that people want. 

This could be achieved in a client/ server setup with a lot of custom automation on the server side. For example lets look at Rust, they are able to generate entire maps when the servers maps expire. There are generation rules, road placement rules, point of interest rules, and so on, down to detail placement. I have witnessed the restarts take as long as 30 minutes and sometimes less than 10 minutes. And that is not that long for what they generate.

My guess is that if PW makes something for this, it would require GaiaPro and GenaPro and likely another Asset that drives the process. And then the question is, do you want the end user to wait for x time to generate a world depending on their setup? 

I would personally be interested in a GaiaPro Runtime edition. The same would hold true for Gena Pro, a runtime edition.