Quite an interesting topic and it’s kind of weird to see the engine doesn’t have support for modifying terrain during runtime.
I’ve spent about a week with the engine now, hands on running through tutorials and examples and I’m very impressed (coming from Unity). This one thing worries me though because I know I’ll have to tackle this at one point or another.
I’m talking about having a large terrain, generated on demand from source data (heightmaps, textures, masks) with tiles being generated and shown where ever the camera happens to move. I could accomplish that with ease in Unity previously, I simply had a grid of terrain instances that I could move around and just assign them new heightmaps and textures when needed. But trying to accomplish the same in UE4 seems rather difficult. I’ve checked the code on this thread and it seems quite low-level, I’m a little surprised there isn’t any higher level solution available. Since we can’t use the built-in terrain we’re missing on a lot of extremely nice-to-have features - having to build everything from ground up seems quite a daunting task.
I’d like to ask for a little advice here: how should I proceed? I have a need for ~1000km x 1000km sized terrain area, impossible to implement with a single terrain (and I’m aware of the floating point accuracy problems, previously I overcame this with floating origin). How huge of a task do you think it would be to implement a terrain system by taking advantage of the code presented here? Also, how to deal with LODding since we don’t have the advantages of the native terrain system?
Also there was a related question asked before and answered: How do I procedurally generate landscape? - World Creation - Epic Developer Community Forums
It appears there was an open feature request for allowing runtime landscape modifications - but I haven’t read anything about any plans to do that so far, and the roadmap has no mention of it: Trello
I just hope this feature request isn’t forgotten. I see it as a pretty important feature.