I’m in the planning stage of making a game which involves an in-game 3D terrain editor which enables users to create their own landscapes.
How difficult it this to create and what would it involve ie. custom programming or blueprints.
Hey there @jesterdayman! Welcome to the community! For runtime terrain generation and manipulation, you’re going to want to look into dynamic mesh generation or procedural mesh generation. Dynamic mesh generation is still considered beta, but is more modern and performant, use at your own discretion.
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Dynamic mesh/Geomtry scripting resources:
Procedural mesh resources:
If you want it to work, custom C++.
You can actually cut the cost a bit by defining the storage of the verts creatively.
For instance, all you care about is the Z height value of each vertex if you only allow the vertex to move in the Z axis.
As such, you can store the z positions only which makes it easier for memory and handling.
If you want to simplify further, you can use a special number (-0?) for any point that nearly matches so that the system knows to utilize the previous height value without you needing to store that exact value over and over again.
Managing the points is hard.
Generating or modyfying the procedural mesh after the points are managed is trivial.
Also, this “tech” is eons old. You will probably find matrix driven optomized code that you can re-purpose out there.
Some will likely also be memory optimized…
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Quote: “Also, this “tech” is eons old. You will probably find matrix driven optomized code that you can re-purpose out there.
Some will likely also be memory optimized…”
This is also why I’m a bit surprised that it seem quite impossible to find a turnkey solution on the marketplace - a developer could easily charge $200 or more for something which works right out of the box.
Honestly, as a marketplace creator…
No.
Epic makes it impossible to publish things to begin with.
The upkeep needed to keep it onto the marketplace is also consoderable when you have to maintain whatever it is you maded up to date (i guess if you choose to do so).
On top of that, People using the engine want the epic made trash to work, so if you even attempt to publish something like this as a procedural mesh component some edjit at the review point of the marketplace publishing project is probably going to deny you publishing just because of the fact that you aren’t using the landacape system.
Sure, you’ll compain, get it and pushed throguh anyway, but youll also have to remove any keyword that would have made it more profitable.
At the same time, there likely already are things like this on the marketplace, just buried by the engine version being changed or the fact they are just old or like i mentioned their keywording is off…
What you should really be surprised about is that epic’s landscape system is so bad and old that it does not and never did support runtime changes…
Well, @MostHost_LA I must admit that reading your post didn’t exactly encourage me to push on with my project using Unreal Engine.
Just to be sure that I haven’t misunderstood you; your are saying that a tool like Runtime Terrain Editor (Unity) does not excist for Unreal Engine, because it can’t be made as the engine is not optimised for it.
The tool would have to be optimized for working at runtime specifically.
The engine is not. Its all static/precomputed.
Okay, thank you for clarifying, I guess I’ll have to go with Unity for my project then.