Does 5.8 Mesh Terrain support creation of a terrain at runtime in a packaged build?

i haven’t found an answer to this so far. lots of flashy vids of it working, lots of feature demos of creation of terrains offline - but the big binary feature that was always missing from ue was the ability to generate a landscape at runtime. i’m interested in doing this, will it support it?

we’ve looked at some alternatives like generating a mesh with geoscript , and even properly converting it to nanite with collision. it took some engine hacking but it does actually work. nothing would beat the ability to use native tech to get a runtime landscape generated - and using something like the landmass systems to sculpt it before a bake step.

obviously its an intensive operation, but for our potential use case, waiting 15 seconds or so for a medium resolution mesh generation would be perfectly acceptable.

so can it?

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Based on the documentation and available functionality, no, such a capability still doesn’t exist.

I’m also upset by this fact, as this is the one thing in UE that prevents many game projects from being implemented natively. It’s unclear why, with the current new technology, they haven’t implemented the ability to edit terrain at runtime…
What’s the point of creating terrain technology with three-dimensional editing in the editor if it’s impossible to use at runtime?

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Yeah, I have never understood why certain things are editor only other than it just being some arbitrary decision someone made, it is rarely a technological one that it can’t be done. You are using the same tech and tools in the editor, another “runtime” executable could obviously call the same code and do the same procedures, access the same data, etc.. Being able to do this at runtime would completely eliminate the need for voxels or other similar plugins.

I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to try something in a game world only to find out it is locked behind with_editor