I have a height map for an area that’s a little over 14 miles square. Obviously breaking it into 11k smaller images and importing them individually isn’t feasible. Are there any other ways to generate terrain of this size from a height map?
What’s the resolution of the height map?
And I did want to mention that I don’t think 14 miles square is even possible to load without serious performance issues. More than a few devs on the forums have tried large maps like this and found the same unusable result.
4096x3200. I see what you mean. I tried breaking it up and importing in 4 16384 stud sections and I’m already seeing a massive slowdown in the Studio after importing only two of them. I also noticed a lot of terracing.
What about including the height map as an asset and dynamically generating the terrain at run time?
I would say using meshes and deloaders instead of terrain would be wayyy better and cause less lag, If thats not an option maybe scale it wayyy down?
I think its gonna be too big. I did a ‘huge’ terrain test with the Grand Canyon, I did one 12k x 12k x 2k chunk and the game is over 64MB in storage. With my 5mbit upload internet speed it takes almost 2 minutes to upload it, so every time I want to save a change, I wait 2 min. With streaming enabled players get pretty decent performance but your map is way bigger.
I haven’t seen any heightmap based run-time terrain generator examples, but that would be cool.
What I had to end up doing to make my ‘world’ bigger was to have space between islands of terrain.
I found it rather challenging to generate a heightmap from real world data that’s small enough(in area) and still high enough in detail for 1:1 scale use in Roblox.
You can check it out here, the terrain is pretty epic though, even at probably 1/2 scale, maybe:
https://www.roblox.com/games/6410195728/Grand-Canyon-Terrain-Test-flight
Hmm. I may have to rethink this then. I’m not too concerned about the detail of the height map because it’s a fan made height map of the entire continent of Tamriel from The Elder Scrolls. The 14 square miles was just the Skyrim province. This is based on the size of the map used in the Skyrim game, which is much smaller than the Skyrim described in TES lore for obvious reasons. The entire continent, even at game scale, would be a few hundred miles.
Tamriel’s size in TES lore is described as roughly the size of the United States. I know that ain’t happening.