Interest in biome spawning at runtime

[FoxTheDog]

Can anyone point me to some info on spawning in Gaia Pro at runtime? I've poked around in the code (wasnt able to find an API ref), and have tried calling spawner.Spawn() for instance. Seems to work in the editor, but probably isn't the best way to handle things in the build. References set to the Gaia Spawner object (set manually in an editor for a scene for instance) seem to not persist in a build, and the logs return NullRefExceptions.

 

Thanks for any info folks can provide. 

[Bryan]

1 hour ago, FoxTheDog said:

Can anyone point me to some info on spawning in Gaia Pro at runtime? I've poked around in the code (wasnt able to find an API ref), and have tried calling spawner.Spawn() for instance. Seems to work in the editor, but probably isn't the best way to handle things in the build. References set to the Gaia Spawner object (set manually in an editor for a scene for instance) seem to not persist in a build, and the logs return NullRefExceptions.

 

Thanks for any info folks can provide. 

No Gaia does not offer runtime options, you would want to use GeNa Pro for this. 

 

[FoxTheDog]

Thanks for the reply

[Adam]

We are positioning GeNa Pro as a complete solution to runtime environmental generation.

It already supports runtime spawning, and soon it will get mesh based terrain generation, and biome support. At this point we will have a fully fledged solution for both design time and runtime, and API based control.

I am always reluctant to make promises on dates, as reality and changing circumstances always intrude, but what I can say is that this is a very high priority for us, and we want to be able to release this as soon as we can. I would say it will likely land in GeNa Pro 2022 in a few months.

Here is a little video we did as a preview:

[FoxTheDog]

This is exciting - these tools make procedural operations very accessible. I appreciate the input and the preview! I'm making good use of GeNa's tools to accomplish my goals for the time being, and look forward to seeing how things progress.

 

 

[dynamiiix]

On 2/6/2022 at 12:06 AM, Adam said:

...and soon it will get mesh based terrain generation

Sorry if I'm bumping this old thread but I'm searching around for some answers and can't find any;

When you say mesh based terrain generation, does this mean a terrain generation like Gaia, just done in runtime?

The biggest issue I'm having with Gaia is that I cannot run the generation in runtime (reference; games like Valheim, or Minecraft), and since it's a core pillar of my game, it is unfortunately unusable. I've looked at GeNa more recently and checked the latest updates but I don't really understand what this mesh based terrain generation means specifically. Will GeNa then eventually replace Gaia as a tool completely?

[Bryan]

Gaia does not do Runtime Generation no. 
There could be ways of creating all of your terrains outside of runtime and then using something like GeNa or Sectr to spawn them however, this does not come out of the box.

[Adam]

On 5/21/2023 at 4:43 AM, dynamiiix said:

The biggest issue I'm having with Gaia is that I cannot run the generation in runtime (reference; games like Valheim, or Minecraft), and since it's a core pillar of my game, it is unfortunately unusable. I've looked at GeNa more recently and checked the latest updates but I don't really understand what this mesh based terrain generation means specifically. Will GeNa then eventually replace Gaia as a tool completely?

Since we wrote this, we have evolved our approach substantially. Gaia is not, and never will be a runtime terrain generation system. It was never sold as one.

We have also changed our direction with GeNa as well, and while we were exploring 100% runtime generation with it, we decided that a new approach was needed to do something truly unique.

The next major evolution of our tools is capable of doing AAA environments, at earth scale, in real-time, and at runtime. The image below was generated in this system.

To achieve something on this scale, we had to re-imagine everything. Unity itself was not up to the task, and won't be for several years at least, so we created our own rendering system. We will integrate it with the new Unity terrain system when it lands, and we plan to bring this to Unreal as well.

While we plan to make a plugin for this for the asset store, we are not planning to sell the rendering system there. It is unique and powerful, and we are taking early expressions of interest from studios that want to license it.