Affordable Landscapes 2 (here by AL2) is a landscape package that contains a variety of landscapes, 64 Square Kilometers each, designed to address your open world needs. Use AL2 for your projects to save a massive a amount of time and money and instantly get your project recognized among the best looking AAA projects available on the market. We have tried to keep the scales as close to real life as possible as we strive to capture the feelings of vast environments and deliver a true open world experience. Each landscape has a low poly version of itself as a static mesh that can be placed outside the landscape bounds in order to increase the view distance. Everything useful in materials is converted into parameters, in other words, every landscape has a material instance that allows for extensive material customization. There are lots of other cool content and features such as lava pits, particles, nature elements and many really valuable functions that are designed to massively boost the landscape quality. These functions are modular and can be easily used for any other landscapes as well.
Some features
• 64 Square Kilometers of playable space per landscape
• Phenomenal learning source (documentation and commenting)
• Extensive material instances for customization
• Fully heightmap based layer blending
• Proceduraly distributed meshes
• High performance tessellation
• Paintable landscape layers
• Controllabe layer blends
• Many useful functions
• Complementary assets
• Background meshes
• Real world scales
• Real world colors
• Material effects
• PBR Materials
• PBR lighting
• Particles
+Bonus content
The rocks, particles and material effects are added free of charge. We’ve went ahead and added our Advanced Grass Material package to AL2 free of charge as well. Please read the documentation first so you can get the most out of it. If you’re still unsure about making the purchase, again please read the documentation so you’ll have a better idea about the content.
Scale Comparison
[spoiler]Blue squares represent AL2 while the red squares represent the other other title. If an image is filled with red squares it means AL2 and that title have the same landscape scales.
I had the same feedback for “infinite” affordable landscapes 1, but it apparently wasn’t important enough to focus on.
I’m a big supporter of alternating the “natural” landscapes a little bit to allow for much better gameplay!
Thanks for the feedback @SE_JonF, @jwatte.
We’ll have some flat-ish areas in the third landscape.
The reason we didn’t like to have flat areas in AL1 was mainly that the landscape size wasn’t big enough to have a believable amount of both flat areas and the surrounding mountains etc. so we could just let you use the flatten tool in engine and flatten the land where you want. With AL2 the landscape size are 4 times bigger and there’s plenty of room to flatten chunks of it.
We have decided to do a What’s New series as long as this package lives. Every What’s New is a projection of a different card on our AL2 Roadmap except, here you will get the full description, images, comparison shots etc. of the feature that’s labled as “Done” and we keep you informed and involved with the development.
[FONT=Comic Sans MS]What’s New? - 001
Function - Albedo to Specular
You have often noticed that when looking at landscapes from some angles the reflections are off. Yes you are right. What this function does is it takes your Albedo as input, some calculations happen inside the function and outputs a Specular for you to connect to the Specular pin which also corrects the Fresnel effect for ground surfaces. This is most useful for surfaces such as grass where the default reflection really shows how bad it is. To show this function in effect, here’s a couple before and after screenshots. (Island from AL1).
Flat surfaces are the worst! POM costs too much, and still looks flat at intersections. Tessellation is even more expensive… But wait! we have a solution! Affordable Landscapes 2 benefits from a Distance Based Tessellation Function which “let’s the users” decide until how far from the player tessellation should be happening. Usually limiting the range to 5-7 meters from the player is the best spot. On top of that it let’s to easily choose the tessellation multiplier, soften the transition been tessellated and non tessellated areas. What about the high tessellation base cost? worry no more… We found the source of the problem and now the way the landscapes are created in AL2 it easily bypass the high tessellation base cost and you are virtually only paying for the amount of triangles you are adding to the landscape within the radius you desire. With that said, let’s celebrate using tessellation on landscapes!
Notice the rectangle intersection with ground at near, and far distance:
All hail flowing lava!
Flows at different speeds based on vertex colors. Flowing speeds can be customized. Has customizable heat haze. Can be placed using landscape spline tool and tiles seamlessly.
Here’s a small **preview **of the third landscape. Enjoy
[FONT=Comic Sans MS]What’s New? - 003
Function - Displacement Fade
Have you ever noticed, if you do a distance based tessellation, there are some small cracks happening at the transition and beyond? The more you amplify the displacement the more the cracks show. It’s because of the fact that from the transition where the tessellations stops there wouldn’t be enough triangles to cover the displacement, and hence it causes some cracks. What the Displacement Fade Function does is it smoothly fades out the displacement a little before the tessellation is faded out, preventing any displacement happening on areas outside the tessellated radius from the player. Again, just like the distance based tessellation function the fade out distances are customizable to fit the user preference.
Lastly, we had a little fun moment internally, worth sharing haha!
@SE_JonF, Ah yes… that should look nice! on the to-do list! Thanks man!
@stucki, To some extent, yes. But we should keep a distinct difference between the two, hence, we can’t copy everything we do for AL2 to AL1 as well. Thanks for the kind words!
[FONT=Comic Sans MS]What’s New? - 004
Function - Distance Fade
When a texture is tiled a lot on a landscape, usually the landscape surface starts to look too repetitive. An old Chinese proverb says: “Tile it less at far distances”. What the Distance Fade Function does is it let’s you choose the distance and falloff in which the less tiled texture starts to appears. Note that the tiling amount of near and far can be adjusted using the landscape’s material instance. (Arid Mountains from AL1).
