#TERRAGEN REALTIME FOR GAMES GENERATOR#
#TERRAGEN REALTIME FOR GAMES CODE#

My first step in converting my Terrain Generation Macros to C# was to convert each Macro into a static C# function and try to match the functionality, which was easy enough. I will find uses for the Bolt plugin in the future, but for now I can't use it for terrain generation. Before moving forward I just wanted to say that moving away from Bolt was actually a hard decision because I have to lose out on the fact that every time I want to change core functionality of the terrain generator, I have to wait for Unity to recompile my code. So then I decided it was time to migrate over to using the new C# Job System. This means the player would be stuck waiting for 35-40 seconds at the start of the game without being able to move, which wasn’t good enough. After trying many optimizations I couldn’t really get around the fact that Bolt needs to run on the main thread and also it cannot be used in a multitasking environment (like a coroutine or Task). I realistically wanted this to be under 5 seconds. The Y axis is seconds, so you can see that I don’t want the average player waiting 35-40 seconds to start a new game. Red Lines: The average amount of time per chunk for that run

What I noticed is that I’m not able to generate a 4×4 amount of space in a reasonable amount of time: Blue Lines: The amount of time it took to generate all chunks Anything smaller than this was not really playable because you would run out of space really quickly. In my testing I decided that I needed a space of at least 4×4 chunks to have a nice “play area” for people to test in (16 tiles total). For generating just a couple of terrain tiles it was relatively fast, but for generating more it was unbearably slow. However whatever points this approach gained in ease-of-use and fast iteration, it loses them all when it comes to performance.

This allowed me to change core functionality of the shaders and see the changes in realtime in the editor.

#TERRAGEN REALTIME FOR GAMES CODE#

You can probably think of a swath of problems that I ran into getting this to work and it was a lot of work but this approach had a huge advantage for fast development: I didn’t need to let Unity recompile my code after I made changes. You can see an overview of how I did this in this blog post. Basically I just started a Bolt macro using a custom event which then did all of the heavy lifting of doing the actual generation and I would just read from a list when the generation was complete. This is completely built using Unity’s Bolt plugin which was originally developed by Ludiq.

#TERRAGEN REALTIME FOR GAMES GENERATOR#

Terrain Generation using Boltįor a quick reminder here is what the terrain generator looked like 2 weeks ago: Click this image if you want to see a full size version in a new tab Here I can just generate terrain around the player and get away with it. Now with this being a top down game I don’t have to worry about the complexities with first person games, which involves needing to generate terrain in the direction that the player is looking. Basically you need to be able to walk around on the map and not even notice that the game is generating terrain around you. One of the final technical challenges getting in the way of releasing a closed alpha build is realtime terrain generation, and more specifically, generating terrain using a coroutine or Task. If you’re just looking for an overview and takeaways, you can skip to the TLDR section below.

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Terragen realtime for games