"Sensible" terrain size for a single terrain map?

[mroshaw]

Hello!

I am creating a single world made up of 4 biomes. Thanks to your help and brilliant tutorial videos, I now have those 4 biomes beautifully spawned in my single terrain.

I've started this with a 2048 x 2048 terrain. This feels like a "doable" scale, given my desire to fit in the 4 biomes, and give my player character lots to do and lots to see. However, I'm worried I've bitten off more than I can chew, for a number of reasons. I know this is a bit of a "fuzzy" question, but:

What, in your opinion, is a "reasonable" size terrain to create in Gaia, without bringing terrain tiles and the corresponding complexity that this adds?

Is 2048 x 2048 borderline daft, requiring more resources than a typical gamer would have available? Is it going to significantly hurt overall performance if I go with this?

Really appreciate your thoughts and feedback!

Oli

• Unity 2021.2.7f1
• HDRP 12.1.2
• Gaia Pro 2021 3.1.4

[Josh]

Well in my opinion 2048 x 2048 is a reasonable scale for a terrain, with your 4 biomes you'd have 512 x 512 size for each biome. This should give enough exploration. It really does depend on your gameplay style and the vision for your world.

Bare in mind you do have to keep an eye of how many different models you use for performance reason. Using different trees, grass etc in each biome would probably result in a lot of performance issues due to unity not being able to batch render since a lot of the assets and materials are not shared. It is very possible to render 10km worlds in Unity with rendering ticks like:

• Billboards
• Fog to hide draw
• Indirect rendering (GPU)
• Agressive LODS
• Dynamic batching which we have a tool that does this here
• Material sharing
• Texture atlases

With some of these you can really make performance pop while maintaining decent overall quality and object density in your scene.

So i think your 2k will work fine just try to share resources as much as you can and note that terrains only support 8 textures so if you have the basic 1 rock and 1 sand that'll leave you with 6 textures to share between 4 biomes.

 

Hope this helps 🙂

[mroshaw]

Perfect answer, thank you Josh!