Project Specifications

[TokisanGames]

This is a start of goals, but I am going to revamp this list into a a prioritized list of feature specifications.

Priorities correspond to project milestones:

• Minimum viable product (Mvp)
• Polished product (Pol)
• Nice to have or optional (Opt)

Overall Goals

• Fast, quality, stable terrain system
• Easy for level designers to use
• Aligns with goals from Godot devs where practical

Sculpting & Painting

• Mvp: Operations: Raise, Lower, Flatten, Smooth | Pol: Slope, Erode
• Mvp: Paintable area expands as you paint in other areas
• Mvp: Allows large, broad strokes to quickly form the landscape
• Mvp: Allows fine grained control over small areas
• Mvp: Brush variety, alpha masks
• Pol: Brush rotates w/ camera
• Opt: Can handle reasonably sharp corners or terraces, rather than just rounded swells.

Materials

• Mvp: High number of textures. 16 at least up to 256. See Terrain Materials #4.
• Mvp: Color map
• Pol: Eliminate texture stretching (3D projection)
• Pol: Detiling
• Pol: Auto texturing
• Pol: Dual scaling
• Opt: Paintable UV scale (Witcher 3)
• Opt: Paintable slope (Witcher 3)

Mesh

• Mvp: View distance can stretch to the horizon
• Mvp: Infinite, repeating mesh as the camera moves
• Mvp: Infinite, repeating heightmap option
• Mvp: Terrain is visually stable without artifacts. Doesn't move, flicker, waver, etc
• Mvp: Adjustable after creation. (Change view distance, lods, limits, scale, mesh resolution, image size)
• Mvp: Supports great heights capable of mountains and valleys
• Opt: Supports holes visually and in collision (if possible)
• Opt: Tesselation

Maps

• Mvp: Resize maps within the editor
• Mvp: Provides an upgrade path from HTerrain
• Mvp: Import / export for integration w/ other apps
• Mvp: Basic noise landscape generation
• Opt: Heightmap generator

Code/Engine

• Mvp: Documented, useful API to get information from or manipulate the terrain.
• Pol: Supports navigation mesh baking

Object Placement

• Pol: Detail instancing - Painting of no-collision, particles or multimesh instanced meshes or billboards for foliage, small rocks
• Opt: Scene placement - Painting of PackedScenes which can include collision, scripts, and anything else.

More will be added here. What are your goals or feature specifications you'd like to see?

[outobugi]

Provides an upgrade path from HTerrain

We'll see. Low priority because we need much done before that.

Can handle reasonably sharp corners or terraces, rather than just rounded swells.

Not hard to do but requires tessellation, or sacrifice vertex budget by having a really dense mesh (~0.3m instead of 1m spacing).

Terrain is visually stable without artifacts. Doesn't move, flicker, waver, etc

Should be done already if we trust my coding. It was tackled in the original.

View distance can stretch to the horizon

Almost done. ;)

Adjustable after creation. (Change view distance, lods, limits, scale, mesh resolution, image size)

Image size could be fixed to 1k. When user paints over that, a new map is generated. (If we go the Juan way)
Need to discuss the distance and how it's implemented. I have some math problems there.

What are your goals?

To live long enough to see a terrain in Godot.

[TokisanGames]

We'll see. Low priority because we need much done before that.

I cannot use the new system until this is supported. My code already supports it anyway, so it's not difficult.

Not hard to do but requires tessellation, or sacrifice vertex budget by having a really dense mesh (~0.3m instead of 1m spacing).

TW3 talk a little bit about tessellating the mesh in their video. This could be a nice to have feature. However I do want to be able to support different densities. TW3 does 0.5. We're using 1m, but I want to go down to 0.5 and increase from a 2k to a 4k heightmap.

Terrain is visually stable without artifacts. Doesn't move, flicker, waver, etc
Yes, hooray. I have this problem now, caused by one mesh rather than individual meshes for each LOD.

Adjustable after creation. (Change view distance, lods, limits, scale, mesh resolution, image size)
Image size could be fixed to 1k.

By image size I mean the heightmap, colormap, sizes. Mine are not fixed and can be resized at any time through the interface. They can also be independent. The only restriction I have now is power of 2 to align w/ collision.

Next, I will separate out the goals list into more higher and lower priorities. At the top are:

• Mesh generation
• Class structure
• Storage structure