New landscape tech
Added 2024-06-29 11:15:33 +0000 UTCAs explained in the latest update on Discord, I have invested in a new landscape system that is very different from the default UE landscape in several ways. It comes in the form of a plugin for the engine called Shader World that can generate a landscape at runtime on the GPU and render it using a method called clipmaps. It has many advantages over the regular UE landscape, with the two main ones being that it is more efficient and can be edited at runtime. This opens the door to letting the player modify the landscape (like a map editor or for building) or even procedurally generating worlds. The downside however is that it doesn't support all the features of the regular landscape, some of which I rely on for other things in the game. It also has a different workflow for making worlds, which is that you have a procedurally generated base layer and then stamp in things like mountains and other terrain features by hand. This can be both good and bad in that it lets you have more fine control over the shape of the terrain, but it can also look less realistic than if you generate the entire terrain in a dedicated software.
I still haven't decided if I will use it, I need to test it more since the documentation is not great and it takes time to figure out what you can and can't do with it. Hopefully I will have some test world next week that gives some more answers.
