Just wondering how games like Manor Lords handle updating the landscape when players add buildings and roads during gameplay? I’m guessing dynamically rendering into the weightmaps which in turn forces an update of the procedural grass and foliage systems. Last time I looked a lot of this functionality seemed to be editor-side only. Or do peeps tend to write their own systems to handle this?
I don’t know how Manor Lords handles it specifically, but there are plenty of ways to edit this stuff at runtime.
The default landscape itself is not runtime editable, but plugins exist to allow it.
Foliage is easily runtime editable. PCG, for example, supports runtime generation.
While the “landscape grass” feature is not runtime editable, the grass material is. This effectively allows color changes or even hiding grass with WPO as needed.
The landscape layers aren’t exactly runtime editable normally, but the material itself can change in response to outside factors. For example, if it is sampling a runtime virtual texture, a weight mask could dynamically write into the virtual texture and change the materials appearance.
So while some systems might be partially baked in at build time, they usually have at least some dynamic elements. If that’s not enough, you may need plugins or custom solutions - but often you can get the desired results with a bit of creativity using the default tools.
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