DEV ANSWER Feedback regarding terraforming and building

[Darkhog 2]

First of all, great game. There are some performance issues (which will be resolved in future I believe), but mostly the game is bugless.

Now, onto feedback thing. The terrain tools need to be all in 3D, including flatten/paint/smooth ones. The current ones would be fine if the terrain would be a heightmap one, but it isn't (which is great, by the way). As it is now:

• The flatten tool fails to work properly if there are empty (air) voxels between the level you try to flatten the ground to and the terrain above.
• The material paint tool is hard to aim properly, even in first person
• Similar to paint tool, smooth tool is hard to aim properly AND it's very hard (to the point of impossibility, although I think you can agree that there are no impossible things, there is only lack of skill needed to complete the task) to smooth out layered terrain, like e.g. when sculpting (example being dragon shown in the trailer, although I don't know whether it is terrain work or a prefab)

As a Unity game developer myself (won't plug my game here, even though it also does low poly untextured, unless specifically asked by the devs/mods), I'd like to thank you for creating such easy to use and powerful building system. As a person who wants to do something similar in the future (although in more realistic setting), i.e. building from single building materials, such as bars, planks, bricks, etc., instead of slapping prefab walls, floors, etc. like e.g. in Rust, I'd like to ask you if you're using some tricks like combining meshes or if those are just freeform prefabs connected by nothing.

Finally, one thing I'd add to the building system would be more kinds of bricks. Or at least ability to select material of one. Those sandstone ones can easily get boring, we need clay and stone bricks (and different kinds of stone). So far you've made great progress and I wish you best of look.

[Aleš Ulm 1725]

Thanks a lot for the feedback!

We know that terrain tools behave unexpectedly under some circumstances and that the controls and visualisation need way more love (we plan to improve those gradually).

As for the "how it's done" part: right now the objects are just prefabs and there's not much magic in the way we work with them. This will obviously become  a problem in massive structures consisting of huge number small  pieces - solving this problem is just one of many challenges that still lie ahead of us

We want to help the others who work with Unity by sharing some tips and tricks - but because doing so by replying specific questions in single posts would be quite ineffective we actually plan to do it on some blog or by opening a specific thread  here or on Unity forums. Once we do we will announce it in here.

More kinds of bricks: noted, thanks

 

[Darkhog 2]

Cool, thanks. And I completely get that sharing knowledge by replying to specific questions is ineffective. Anyway, from my game, where levels are built from untextured 3d primitives, each up to 242 vertices, I've did some tests and as it turns out, I can put out even like 800k of lowpoly spheres (biggest object in terms of vertex and tri count, 242 vertices) without any noticeable hit for the performance, colliders and all (each separate gameobject and each contains few scripts that have bit lengthy Update() method). So I guess you should be okay for a while. Possibly max limit is even triple of that, but I didn't test for that since it's not likely that anyone will use even half as much objects in their level (and even then, most of the stuff is being built using cuboids and cylinders, which have less polycount).

Anyway, good luck to you guys!