Unity terrain is fairly typical. Import a heightmap, and use the basic carving tools (raise/lower, smooth, noise, etc). There are a lot of things in the Asset Store (pathfinding, water shaders, AI scripts, a few models, a couple destruction simulators that really don't work that good, but they're not HORRID, there's even a voxel system that's kind of neat).
I think I know what you're talking about specifically though, it's a procedural terrain generator? It's not that great - it's essentially like any other procedural terrain generator, it works but with minimal control over it so you're going to have some trouble getting exactly what you want.
And it compiles essentially the same way for whatever you distribute on. It's not a very complicated process.
The learning curve for Unity is steeper than other engines (say, ShiVa, which is fairly easy to pick up but is really weird, never liked Shiva that much. The terrain editor is a huge pain in the ass, but can be somewhat effective if you have a heightmap; or UDK, but that may be because it has a very vast amount of information on it), and doing some basic things can be more time consuming (like setting up cameras).
I've used it before. It's a decent engine. There are some limitations on the free edition, but you can get a significant amount done with it. The biggest issue I had with the free version is that you can't stream terrain, as the commands are a Pro-only feature, but altogether it's not bad. I mean it's a game engine; you can do pretty much everything with it that you can do with any other game engine.
If you give more details as to what you want to do, I could tell you about it's strengths/weaknesses (or other engines).
I've always wanted to hunt a kangaroo. And get a pet wallaby. I'd name him Rocko, people would always mistake him for a kangaroo and would I correct them with an annoying anguished tone. I've been working on the toxic sewer plant thing for a while.
And pray tell, why can't we have some tweaks for custom games? Just for custom games. Ladder, I can see the latency being necessary, but custom games? Suppose there was an option permitting the mapmaker and/or the players to decide if they want their game to run on lower latency settings or not?
because you cant do that.. I think you missed all the talk about this back in the beta... this is how RTS servers are set up.. they have to send information this way.. they have no way to toggle it for custom maps or non custom maps. It would take a FULL rewriting of their system to do this. Its something they said they want to do very bady.. but its a great great deal of work and no easy task.
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Not necessarily. It might be an arbitrary latency that they can change with relative ease. I CAN see them writing it exactly like that since Blizzard does things like open source devs (which is to say, they do things that make no god damn sense to anyone else), but that would be extremely stupid. In reality they don't even really need the inherent latency like it's set up; a more intelligent option would be to set up whatever is acting as the master server (do they still use peer to peer or is it a dedicated array?) to change it automatically depending on the player's connection speed to keep everyone at the same instance. That's how my network's been set up. Faster everyone's connection is, faster the game. Slower connections, slower game. It's a little longer and takes up a little bit more power to track everything, but it's hardly noticeable. And on the topic, why didn't they do it in the start? Are their programmers seriously this bad at planning?
@colt
It's likely hardcoded into the editor bit, not the engine. To hardcode all of these things into the engine itself would be blatantly idiotic. You could just scale everything down and get a bigger map, at the loss of detail on the terrain primarily, but I'm sure it would be possible to increase it if you modified the editor somewhat. I have no idea what kind of security is on it, if you did that it might not play anymore if they decided to make the game reject anything like that.
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Arena was cool. Daggerfall was awesome. Morrowind was awesome. Oblivion sucked. Skyrim ????
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Most of college was relatively boring.
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Unity terrain is fairly typical. Import a heightmap, and use the basic carving tools (raise/lower, smooth, noise, etc). There are a lot of things in the Asset Store (pathfinding, water shaders, AI scripts, a few models, a couple destruction simulators that really don't work that good, but they're not HORRID, there's even a voxel system that's kind of neat).
I think I know what you're talking about specifically though, it's a procedural terrain generator? It's not that great - it's essentially like any other procedural terrain generator, it works but with minimal control over it so you're going to have some trouble getting exactly what you want.
And it compiles essentially the same way for whatever you distribute on. It's not a very complicated process.
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You compile it.
The learning curve for Unity is steeper than other engines (say, ShiVa, which is fairly easy to pick up but is really weird, never liked Shiva that much. The terrain editor is a huge pain in the ass, but can be somewhat effective if you have a heightmap; or UDK, but that may be because it has a very vast amount of information on it), and doing some basic things can be more time consuming (like setting up cameras).
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I've used it before. It's a decent engine. There are some limitations on the free edition, but you can get a significant amount done with it. The biggest issue I had with the free version is that you can't stream terrain, as the commands are a Pro-only feature, but altogether it's not bad. I mean it's a game engine; you can do pretty much everything with it that you can do with any other game engine.
If you give more details as to what you want to do, I could tell you about it's strengths/weaknesses (or other engines).
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Uhh... what?
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It in no way makes sense. Besides, the poor man's option of Internet sleuth always exists.
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60 dollars for Starcraft does not equate to 3500 for 3ds Max by stretching your budget.
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I've always wanted to hunt a kangaroo. And get a pet wallaby. I'd name him Rocko, people would always mistake him for a kangaroo and would I correct them with an annoying anguished tone. I've been working on the toxic sewer plant thing for a while.
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My friend got kicked by a kangaroo once. He sent me a video of it, he tried to pet it. Funniest thing I have ever seen....
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Quote from Molsterr:
Quote from OneSoga: Go
And pray tell, why can't we have some tweaks for custom games? Just for custom games. Ladder, I can see the latency being necessary, but custom games? Suppose there was an option permitting the mapmaker and/or the players to decide if they want their game to run on lower latency settings or not?
because you cant do that.. I think you missed all the talk about this back in the beta... this is how RTS servers are set up.. they have to send information this way.. they have no way to toggle it for custom maps or non custom maps. It would take a FULL rewriting of their system to do this. Its something they said they want to do very bady.. but its a great great deal of work and no easy task.
----
Not necessarily. It might be an arbitrary latency that they can change with relative ease. I CAN see them writing it exactly like that since Blizzard does things like open source devs (which is to say, they do things that make no god damn sense to anyone else), but that would be extremely stupid. In reality they don't even really need the inherent latency like it's set up; a more intelligent option would be to set up whatever is acting as the master server (do they still use peer to peer or is it a dedicated array?) to change it automatically depending on the player's connection speed to keep everyone at the same instance. That's how my network's been set up. Faster everyone's connection is, faster the game. Slower connections, slower game. It's a little longer and takes up a little bit more power to track everything, but it's hardly noticeable. And on the topic, why didn't they do it in the start? Are their programmers seriously this bad at planning?
@colt
It's likely hardcoded into the editor bit, not the engine. To hardcode all of these things into the engine itself would be blatantly idiotic. You could just scale everything down and get a bigger map, at the loss of detail on the terrain primarily, but I'm sure it would be possible to increase it if you modified the editor somewhat. I have no idea what kind of security is on it, if you did that it might not play anymore if they decided to make the game reject anything like that.
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Sounds like what you want is a new game engine.
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@zeldarules28:
Yeah I'm sure the first thing she did was hit the floor in a ball.
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My sister lives in Queens and said they got some of it as well.
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Meh...