With no way to make a decent road, progress on the project has been stalled for a whole month. I have tried almost every method except for paid plugins, but they all have serious flaws and are unusable.
The landscape I am working on is 16km square, the size of 8129 scaled by 200x. My definition of a “functional” road is:
- The landscape automatically adjusts to the road level.
- One spline is used per lane.
- Created in Blueprint, it can contain additional meshes or aid in NPC identification.
That’s all there is to it, but none of the methods I tried were able to meet these requirements.
- Landscape splines are the most commonly used, but their information cannot be referenced or modified in Blueprints. In other words, it is impossible to implement practical functionality, and it is just for looks.
- Blueprint brushes in particular looked promising, but they were completely unoptimized and kept crashing my GPU. Furthermore, a bug that disables World Partition unloading makes it impossible to even split and process.
- The combination of Landscape Patch and PCG seemed easy to use, but the Patch did not support slopes, making it extremely awkward on slopes. Creating a smooth gradient requires a large number of Patch actors.
- The Editor Apply Spline I’m currently working on sets the height with an offset, so it seems it can only be used on flat terrain. Also, once you set the transformation, it remains, which is very troublesome.
As you can see, most approaches fall short on the first requirement. Especially with Editor Apply Spline, I don’t understand why I can’t choose between absolute and relative. If it doesn’t work on edited landscapes, what else can it be used for?
Blueprint brushes and Landscape Patch seem like a development slacker. These looks like they were made to a certain extent and then abandoned halfway through. Blueprint brushes in particular seem to have been left abandoned since the UE4 era. Not compatible with new technologies.
Sorry for the long post, but does anyone know of a better way? I’ll also consider paid plugins, but there may be a way to edit the landscape that I haven’t tried yet. I look forward to hearing your opinions.