TerraMech turns the ground into part of the drive. Mud, snow and sand give way under the wheels and keep the ruts. Put it under any Chaos wheeled vehicle and over any Landscape, and your offroad game drives on soil instead of on a hard floor.
The soil
A deformable soil layer over any Landscape, built only where your vehicles drive: 16 m tiles of 12.5 cm cells. The Landscape itself is never modified.
Ruts that stay, soil pushed aside by the tyres and tracks that get harder as they are driven.
Five base soils (mud, sand, snow, gravel and firm ground) and eight ready Soil Profiles. Every Soil Profile is a Data Asset: make your own soils without code.
The vehicles
Wheel-soil physics: sinkage with spring-back, grip from wheel slip, compaction resistance, bulldozing and soft tyres.
Works with any Chaos wheeled vehicle: in maps with soil the wheel component is added automatically, with no changes to your vehicle's Blueprint.
Water and effects
Water areas for fords and swamps, with drag that slows the vehicle.
Mud splatter, dust, snow powder, water drops and mist.
Race kit (optional)
Terra Course: soil sections, fords, gates, lap timer and countdown.
AI racers, each with its own driving style, held on the grid until GO.
Race display and start menu. They appear only in maps with a Terra Course, so your own maps stay untouched.
Use all of it, part of it or none of it: the soil works on its own.
Multiplayer
Server-authoritative soil with client prediction: every player sees the same ruts.
Players who join late get the soil as it is.
Tested with a listen server and a client.
Included
L_TerraTrack: a 3.3 km loop over its own terrain, deformable soil on every metre of the track, with every soil type and water crossings, played with the Terra Demo Game Mode.
TerraRover, an original off-road crawler made for TerraMech with its own materials: the default demo vehicle and the AI racers' car.
Auto, Low, Medium and High quality settings for drawing and effects.
Technical details
Unreal Engine 5.7 and 5.8, Windows (Win64).
C++ code plugin with source: TerraCore (engine-independent soil core), TerraMech (runtime), TerraMechUI (race display and menus) and TerraMechEditor.
Uses Chaos Vehicles, Procedural Mesh Component and Enhanced Input, all part of Unreal Engine and enabled by the plugin.
Race kit keys: F1 controls, F2 hide display, F3 soil debug, R back to the track, F5 restart, Esc menu.
Documentation in the plugin's Docs folder: README, Quick Start, how-to guides, full reference, performance notes and known limits.
Coming next
Wheel contact computed on the physics thread for even tighter contact at speed.
Soils that behave even more differently: snow that glazes in the ruts, mud that clogs the tyres.
Smooth blending where two soils meet.
New soils: ice and packed snow, wet clay, fesh-fesh and peat bog.
Characters and objects that leave marks in the ground.