I’m making a 3rd person shooter called Ultimate Combat, and I went with ROBLOX terrain right off the bat. I don’t want it to be too realistic, but I also don’t want it to be too simple. I have barely seen any professional games use ROBLOX terrain, besides showcases. I think that my game should only use part terrain, because all the structures are made out of parts.
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Generally those types of games dont use editor. It is my opinion that you shouldnt use it as its not as good, it takes longer and they dont fit as well into shooting games. The second pic’s hills are jagged. You should use terrain editor plugins or just a stretched part. Hope this helped
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You’ll likely have a much better time building your map with ‘part terrain’ instead of using Smooth Terrain. Besides visually matching with your other part-built models, it will be more performant as well.
Smooth Terrain comes with LOD artifacts which are much worse on lower end devices (mobile), so using it in a situation like this where the map is a critical part of the gameplay environment is not advisable.
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I would strongly recommend using terrain-based mapping for some aspects of your mapping. I found that using part-based terrain was more cumbersome to load, parse through, be performant with, etc.
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Hey,
In my opinion terrain is a great way to make games more realistic, especially when it comes to nature as you have plenty of different types to choose of. You’re making a 3rd person shooter and as I can see it’s a smaller closed map. I’d say rather stick with blocks than terrain as it will make your life easier, be less laggy for some players and probably look better because those dirt walls aren’t the best looking.
On the other hand, you could try creating a terrain 3rd person shooter and actually succeed as there aren’t many of these and people like the realistic feeling of it. If you’re going to stick with the terrain I’d highly recommend you to search up some pictures of battlefields on google. By doing this you will have a clear plan and a good looking shooter game.
I hope this helped you!
- Cheerful
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The terrain on roblox is definitely niche, but it’s pretty good and it’s possible to incorporate it into a majority of maps/games.
You just need to be able to use the studio tools to smooth things out and mold it to be more fitting for a natural setting. When you do that, it doesn’t look chunky anymore and the grass just gives your game a lot of depth. However, that being said, it’s more for open world/large landscape games. A lot of the popular games don’t really need that, and that’s why you won’t see it being used. Furthermore, it’s still quite relatively new, and many devs aren’t comfortable with it.
For your build itself, a glaring issue with your map is that it’s highlighting the faults with terrain by not being efficiently used. In the first picture, terrain parts isn’t enabled so you won’t get the long grass that’s the main selling point of using it. In the second picture, the edges are too sharp and aren’t smoothed out. The third picture also suffers from the same issue, but there’s also where the road and the grass meet. It’s uneven. Might want some more experience with it.
TL;DR
Terrain is for big maps & landscaping. Fits very well for “realistic” games. Developers are also not comfortable using it from what I see.
I’ve hardly used terrain (or build at all), but this is a small demonstration of what you can do. Took 25-30 minutes at most.
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Roblox terrain can definitely look really nice if used correctly, not to mention there are devs who specialize in terrain.
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I’m terrible with terrain, so I don’t use it much. Maybe try doing part terrain first. I think you should do part based terrain. You can make so much more with part terrain.
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