Beginner: How to work with all the Gaia generated terrains and gameobjects?

[TooLoo]

Hello there,

I'm still new to working with terrains. I used Gaia pro 2021 to successfully generate a 6km x 6km world with the default alpine biome readily available with Gaia. I have a few questions on the workflow afterwards:

1. When Gaia creates its runtime stuff, it adds a loading screen, player controller, terrain manager and a few other things. Are these Gaia-generated gameobjects with scripts necessary to use this generated world? I tried removing Gaia's provided player controller and added my own player controlled camera that I'm using for my game, but the terrain chunks stopped loading automatically as I move my custom camera around.

2. For large worlds, I see the terrain chunks have been separated into different scenes. If I'm using my own character controllers now, do I have to create my own scripts to control how the scenes will load depending on their location? For example, if my custom character just keeps walking in one direction, will the terrain loading/unloading automatically be handled by Gaia (i.e. by this "Terrain Loader Manager" gameobject in the hierarchy) or do I have to handle it myself.

3. I created this world in an empty test project. How would I export the terrains with all the relevant Gaia-settings into my actual game project? Or is it better to just import the Gaia pro 2021 into my game project and generate the world directly in my game project?

Any insight would be appreciated. Thanks.

[Bryan]

On 5/2/2022 at 1:04 PM, TooLoo said:

1. When Gaia creates its runtime stuff, it adds a loading screen, player controller, terrain manager and a few other things. Are these Gaia-generated gameobjects with scripts necessary to use this generated world? I tried removing Gaia's provided player controller and added my own player controlled camera that I'm using for my game, but the terrain chunks stopped loading automatically as I move my custom camera around.

Yes if you are using Gaia's world streaming these are necessary. If you with to use your own controller and camera you can still do so. In the Gaia Manager - Runtime- Player- Change the player to custom and then you can use your own camera and player. 
 

On 5/2/2022 at 1:04 PM, TooLoo said:

2. For large worlds, I see the terrain chunks have been separated into different scenes. If I'm using my own character controllers now, do I have to create my own scripts to control how the scenes will load depending on their location? For example, if my custom character just keeps walking in one direction, will the terrain loading/unloading automatically be handled by Gaia (i.e. by this "Terrain Loader Manager" gameobject in the hierarchy) or do I have to handle it myself.

If you use Gaia's Custom player, no you would not need to do this. It automatically ties into our systems. 

 

On 5/2/2022 at 1:04 PM, TooLoo said:

3. I created this world in an empty test project. How would I export the terrains with all the relevant Gaia-settings into my actual game project? Or is it better to just import the Gaia pro 2021 into my game project and generate the world directly in my game project?

This depends on what you are actually using. If you plan on using Gaia's systems like streaming, lighting, water, etc 
then you can take advantage of the Gaia Script Only package. Then you can import your Terrain Data and Terrain Layers to the new project. If you plan on using the biomes etc, then I would suggest that you import Gaia directly to the main project and simply remove anything that you are not going to use (other biomes, etc.). 

Hopefully this answers your questions! 
 

[TooLoo]

Thank you for the response! After playing with Gaia for a few more days, these workflows make more sense now.

[Bryan]

No problem!