1 - Yes, they have. Before UE 4.13, if you wanted deeper details on landscape, you needed to use parallax occlusion mapping which upped your shader complexity like crazy and wasted resources. Now that DX-12 has been more thoroughly implemented, you can make your landscape work much better with LODs and cull it for significantly less cost, and after UE 4.13 you can tessellate your landscape and only the lowest LOD will feature the triangle explosion. You can displace detail with real geometry for less than the cost of parallax occlusion and save as much as 10 FPS using the new technique while benefiting from all of tessellation’s features: proper occlusion, proper lighting, proper shadows. You can also apply deformed vertices to the landscape’s physical heightfield for collision.
2 - Landscape deformation would impede on the purpose of a height-field. With heightfields, we have a very cheap method for dynamic GI and a fully accurate model for use with the distance field features. If you want to model something other than what is possible on a height field you will need to build your own meshes on top of it, but you will also lose some features: unseen parts won’t cull, tessellation must be applied to the whole object, and while you can use vertex blending on static meshes, you can’t change the surface’s physical properties with it.
3 - There really isn’t a huge demand for Super Mario Galaxy-esque or No Man’s Sky spherical type of world building. The unusual surface is much more complicated, especially from an artist’s standpoint, and much more difficult to render from an engineer’s. Few people really care to make games like this, and few seriously wish to play them. If you want to make an environment, landscape is for all intents and purposes the best tool to do it. If someone wants to make spherical worlds, that’s cool, and people will comment that it’s cool. Super Mario Galaxy did an amazing job, and that was cool. But it’s highly unorthodox and largely impractical a feature for a massive mainstream game engine to tackle. That’s like saying UE4 is a terrible engine because it doesn’t support Rift’s megatextures or Portal’s gravity gun. No, lacking those things doesn’t make it a terrible engine. If you want to build those things, you can with the tools available. You just have to adjust your scope and tackle it in a different way. Instead of massive gigantic spherical planets, try smaller SMG-sized planets and use static meshes with face extrusions for that.
Yes, VR is exploding now, and tools need to be made in the engine in order to support development for it, and that takes time. I just got back from a meetup of UE4 developers in my area, and there are guys making procedurally generated games in VR right now, VR tools for the Marketplace, and a VR ad concept for Coca Cola. And VR was added in like a few months ago. Yes, landscape was also featured in UDK 5 years ago when I first started learning it with many of the same features it has today, but now the engine has been built to the point where we can fully take advantage of it and do things that we could never do before, like tessellation. It’s hard to tell in the shot below, but the entire scene is being lit by underwater caustics, and the light from the caustics not only bends around the tessellated landscape surface, but also casts a shadow and occludes correctly. This would’ve been impossible to do before UE 4.13 as tessellation would be applied to the whole landscape and sink the performance like a dead weight. Now, you can do it on a GTX 960 in 80 FPS. That’s what’s improved with landscape in the most recent update. And that’s only just the landscape. We also got sequencer in June.
