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HORIZON[ON] - Bridge the gap between the sky and your scenery.

Discussion in 'Assets and Asset Store' started by Becoming, Jul 30, 2014.

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In which scenarios would you use Horizon[ON] ?

  1. Small to medium sized terrains (first/third person view/driving game)

    33.9%
  2. Small to medium sized terrains (flying game)

    17.5%
  3. Big to huge sized terrains (first/third person view/driving game)

    41.4%
  4. Big to huge sized terrains (flying game)

    31.9%
  5. Small to medium sized terrains on mobile (first/third person view/driving game)

    16.9%
  6. Small to medium sized terrains on mobile (flying game)

    13.1%
  7. Big to huge sized terrains on mobile (first/third person view/driving game)

    16.4%
  8. Big to huge sized terrains on mobile (flying game)

    18.1%
Multiple votes are allowed.
  1. broesby

    broesby

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    Hi Peter,... Thx for the manual.... I will be honest. It wasn't your fault I couldn't get to it. Apparently I was on a rather slow work connection and dropbox kept timing out... but thx. I was just so frustrated because I finally got around to testing out horizon for real and couldn't really ;) Normally I just try stuff but horizon setup is rather complex :rolleyes: Sorry for that!

    So... It seems I want to make a similar setup to some of the people above. I would love to use HorizonON with a multitiled terrain of some size. I didn't decide on the exact size yet but I could do with a 20000 x 20000 or so to keep within reasonable limits of floating point hassle... I would probably want a setup somewhat like RandAiThor with 3 x 3 active terrains and some inactive ones beside that will be loaded with either SECTR stream or worldstreamer or some other asset...

    What I want to ask you is this:

    Since my game is a flying game I need the area where the there are inactive / disabled terrains to be filled with something. I cannot have active terrain and then free space and then outside area with horizonON. SO do you think I should fill the inactive terrain area with either 1) Low res terrain 2) Low poly terrain mesh 3) Some kind of HorazonON magic setup :D

    I was thinking something like your Multilevel Arrangement where the Displacement Level Start would be created with the same height map as the terrain itself and then placed just a fraction lower than the terrain... So when the terrain is active and loaded it would "pop in" and cover the horizon part... Can you follow me? :cool:

    Or do you think I would be better off doing the same with low res terrain or mesh and then just have HorizonON handle the outer areas???

    Any thoughts what would be best for either 1) Performance and 2) Looks.... and is it even possible with HorizonON?

    I made a hand draft :rolleyes:

    horizon.jpg
     
  2. Becoming

    Becoming

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    Thanks for the good explanation and the sketch, it definitely helps to guide you.

    Like you say there are 3 different options to close the gap between your streamed terrains and the outer horizon:
    1) Unity terrains (slowest but might be easier with trees - not sure about that)
    2) Mesh terrains (faster than terrains but high VBO and many materials needed, unless used with custom top projection shader)
    3) Custom Horizon setup (most likely the fastest option but not supported out of the box)

    Any of the options would require some research, texture work and scripting. Scripting would mostly take care about enabling/disabling tiles as the player moves from one tile to another, but also about world shifting(recenter the player and the world as with greater distance form the origin you get floating point inaccuracies - like you already mentioned).

    If you want to go for option 3 you should be familiar with horizon and have at least worked through the getting started guide. Anyway, for what you have in mind you would need to have 2 Horizons - each set uses its own horizon master and its own material set as you dont want to have setup 1 to interfere with setup 2.The materials are resued and shared as much as possible with horizon to save drawcalls. If you have 2 horizons in a scene which need to be independent, each horizon(its children meshrenderers) need to use its own material set. So you would need to duplicate the material folder and assign them to the according meshrenderers.

    Horizon 1 would surround your terrains and fill exactly the area all your inactive terrains would cover together. Horizon 2 would surround the whole setup like usual.

    In the center you have your 9 active terrains.
    Horizon 1 - Use one Displacement level regular(Multi level arangements) per one tile of your inactive terrain in your sketch for it, with the combined heightmap as your entire terrain setup would use. Here is the first potential limitation, the mask would either mimik your splatmap(Horizon is not a terrain shader so you are limited to 4 layers) or only 1 layer with your global colormap/normalmap. Both heightmap and colormap need to be of rather good resolution so you dont see too much of a difference on the transition whcih would be the other potential limitation.
    horizonSetup1.jpg
    Tiles in this illustration refer to the meshes in the sources folder of horizon not the prefabs (..\Assets\Horizon[ON]\Sources\Meshes)

    Above you can see how i would setup the horizon for streaming. The green sqaures are your terrains and they would move relatively to the blue squares. with scripting you would need to move or enable/disable the blue squares to fill any holes and not be placed on top of your terrains. the purple/orange tiles are the falloff... it will make the horizon flat on the outer edge. so you can blend it easily with horizon setup 2. The outer falloff might not be needed, especially not in the research/testing stage but i added it for a more complete setup.

    The horizon tiles in the illustration would cover your entire heightmap(all your active and inactive terrains together) and would use a mask size as your terrain area and a tiling of 1.

    In the testing research stage i would test only with one horizon setup and only use the blue tiles(disp level regular meshes)

    Horizon setup 2 is basically just horizon as usual and surrounds everything(Don't forget setup 1 and setup 2 can not share materials).

    You probably need more advice along the way(you can hit me up on skype - leave me a pm with your contact) but this is a good outline of how it can be done. Please note that this world streaming compatiblity is not an advertised feature and i can only give limited support for it. While Horizon has been designed with streaming compatibility in mind i decided against including it in the feature list. Sales/Price would not justify to add it(at the moment at least).

    Anyway, I hope it helps,
    Peter
     
    twobob and hopeful like this.
  3. hopeful

    hopeful

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    Hmm. It sounds like maybe some variation on the above could be used with Curved World 2, to have one horizon for low altitude and an additional curving horizon for very high altitude ...?

    Good to know about the quirks of running more than one horizon at a time. :)
     
    Becoming likes this.
  4. broesby

    broesby

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    A very thorough and excellent answer... Thank you so much. Would not have thought about using two horizon setups ;)

    I don't know if I will be able to pull it off as I am not much of a coder, but I will give it a try o_O
    Although it will have to wait until after my holiday. Going to Sri Lanka with wife and kids for the next five weeks :D

    But thanks Peter. I really like Horizon...For someone who makes a flying game it is a must if you don't want to just make islands all the time. Cya.

    Jesper.
     
    Becoming likes this.
  5. Becoming

    Becoming

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    You are welcome & thx Jesper, glad you like horizon!
    Islands are still nice, but even nicer are archipels, which are very easy to make with horizon ;)
    Enjoy Sri Lanka ;)
     
  6. Becoming

    Becoming

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    Should be doable, i dont see why not... although to see the curvature of the earth you need to be really high and view distances need to be insanely large... much larger than unity's(non-logarhythmic)depthbuffer can handle.

    But for stylized worlds (i am thinking of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The little Prince) it would be cool... also it might be possible to trick abit with scaling horizon and tile the mask accordingly for realisticly sized planets.
     
    docsavage and hopeful like this.
  7. xinoHITO1

    xinoHITO1

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    it's sorta like some small cliffs and rather tall mountains with hills in between. The problem I seem to be having is that I'm not sure on how to create the displacement mask. I want to create a terrain and then use that terrain as the displacement map... but I'm not sure it works correctly. How do you make it? Is it the same as the splatmap of the terrain or is it the heightmap?

     
    Last edited: Feb 19, 2016
  8. Becoming

    Becoming

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    Basically you can paint the displacement, however i think you may not entirely be sure about the concept of how to work with horizon. Since the answer would be to lenghty i made a pdf document for you(and others that are interested):

    Horizon[ON] - Understanding the basic concept
     
    Tinjaw, docsavage, hopeful and 3 others like this.
  9. jonfinlay

    jonfinlay

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    Excellent manual, thanks for making it! The level and quality of support you give is excellent.
     
    Teila likes this.
  10. xexijreil

    xexijreil

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    Hi! I'm willing to reproduce the Grand Canyon as accurate as possible, and this may be the perfect asset to do it cause the Camera Movement in my game will be just vertical, so I need to create that perspective view.

    As I am quite newbie both in Unity and 3D creation, I've been reading the whole thread and the docs of Horizon to try to understand how all this works, but still I'm a bit lost with all this new info I'm trying to process. So I have some questions related to this:

    1. To reproduce the Grand Canyon or whatever piece of real world terrain, wouldn't it be better to work with just one layer instead of 4? I'm thinking this, because this way I wouldn't have to create a splatmap. If not, why not? I suppose that if I use just one layer the colormap resolution should be as great as possible as it wouldn't be tiled, would this be possible?

    2. I've seen that many of you use World Machine to export color, normal and height maps. So, if I'm not wrong, I would just have to create the terrain in world machine with a HeightMap and just output the mentioned maps without any other filter in between, is this right?. Which file type would be better for Horizon to use? Would I have to edit those files in photoshop or something?

    Thank's a lot in advance!!
     
    Last edited: Mar 9, 2016
  11. Becoming

    Becoming

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    Yes, basically you answer most of your questions yourself, you can use one layer but resolution will be a challenge... you have to consider that with Horizon[ON] we are talking about potentially many thousand square kilometers. What you can alternaitvely try is to use 4 layers instead of one but mask them in quarters... that way you can use 4x4k(or 8k if the specs allow).... you can use another horizon surrounding your high res horizon which uses tiling, as in a certain distance accuracy to the real world is not so important... nobody could tell anyway.

    The worldmachine approach is very good, fileformat does not matter, as long as unity can interpret it, heightmaps for horizon just needs to be 8bit instaed of the usual 16bit. You can edit the colormaps to add more high res detail or be creative with it...

    If you run into anything where you need help with, just let me know ;)
     
  12. hippocoder

    hippocoder

    Digital Ape

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    Interesting asset, wondered if it supports changing time of day etc?
     
  13. Becoming

    Becoming

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    Sure it does, it supports weather changes as well(morning ground fog, snow, freezing lakes...) :) also it works with pretty much any skysolutions out there. Try the demo:
    https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/276739935/Build1/Horizon[ON]ExampleScene.html
    its a 20mb Webplayer so you gotta use some browser that can play unity webplayers... eg. firefox
     
  14. Deleted User

    Deleted User

    Guest

    Hey..I need to use the object shader, for an island.​
    What can I do to add lighmaps? Can I add that in the shader?

    Because, looks like all my baked lightng data..is lost..
    Forget it... shader crashes gles2 on android...unusable for low end mobile

    P
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 17, 2016
  15. xexijreil

    xexijreil

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    I will keep on investigating the best way to get the textures and, when I have all clear, I might buy the asset and try it. Have spotted with a way to get heightmap and textures from sketchup instead of Google Earth, but don't know what will give better resolution yet.

    Thank's a lot for your help!

    P.S.: I'm wondering how Horizon would treat the flat part of the canyon which isnt seen from above, how would those terrace shapes be texturized?
     
  16. khos85

    khos85

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    Hi, I am using horizon to great effect but recently added the Unity Edge detect script (EdgeDetectEffectNormals), and it shows the edges of the Horizon objects also, see highlighted in screenshot:
    edges.png
    Could I ask if there might be a way to avoid this? Any recommendations would be appreciated.
     
  17. creat327

    creat327

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    hi
    I've bought Horizon but I have a simple question. Is it possible to bake that water automatically? I love how that water looks and it runs fine on mobile (it's just a baked texture!). My game water doesn't look like it, so I would like to just place a plane into one of my hill holes and let it detect the shore line and bake it: shore lines+water. That way I can place that plane into the terrain and make it look like I have an ocean/lake in there with hyper fast performance.

    Right now I have the odd situation that the horizon water looks better than my close terrain water lol
     
  18. djsegler

    djsegler

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    I just purchased Horizon[on] ver 1.2 and I'm trying to make my way through the basic "getting started" portion of the manual. Aside from a few differences between versions of Unity and assumed defaults, the process seems very straight forward.

    I'm having a serious problem though that is keeping me from making progress. When I drop in the Terrain prefab from the example scene content, I just get an untextured terrain object. When I try to open the example scenes, I get a similar effect, but the processed "horizon" elements exist and look great. I did have to import the building/tree shader update to get it to work at all, but it still has the same basic problem of not texturing the main terrain object.

    Am I missing something obvious?

    When I open the example project for mobile, texture materials appear to be applied, but there are distinct lines between the different elements (see attached).
     

    Attached Files:

    Last edited: Apr 20, 2016
  19. djsegler

    djsegler

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    OK - It appears as though maybe my machine is just really slow and it take some time for things to bake. After placing the terrain prefab into a new empty scene and waiting a couple of minutes, the material finally shows up. Similarly, the example project appears to be better as well after waiting for a short bit. Maybe it's time for a new Mac!
     
  20. djsegler

    djsegler

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    Well - it seems to have nothing to do with "baking". I disabled all of that. If I simply follow the "Getting Started" guide and drop in the first Terrain sample, the material looks funky for a while - even if I hit "play". After a few minutes, everything suddenly looks correct. What's happening? I'm still learning Unity, so I'm sure it's either pilot error or something I just don't understand.
     
  21. djsegler

    djsegler

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    I'm getting the following error when I try to enable normalmapping with the example content:
    Shader error in 'Horizon[ON]/Horizon[ON] TransitionSky': failed to open source file: '_horizON_Core.cginc' at line 208 (on glcore)

    Why is that?
     
  22. Becoming

    Becoming

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    I am working on Skyscraper/Modern Building solution for our game, they are meant as background objects but they hold up some closer inspection quite nicely, so it would be possible to place them within your levels if you place them on top of your own base buildings or create a fassade for the first storey. Some features are:
    • Combineable/Batchable - they all use the same Material(Huge City - One DrawCall).
    • Super fast performance(mostly because of the above point)
    • Little Texture memory needed
    • Gradual Damage
    • Gradual Day/Night Cycle Window Lighting
    • PBR
    • Horizon[ON] Fog/Snow
    • Parallaxed Windows
    Skyscrapers.gif

    Still WIP, so there are only a few buildings to show, The texture atlas and the Shader would probably allow for hundred+ of unique modern buildings, so probably there will be many, depends also on the interest/feedback from you guys. If there is enough interest i would put it on the store. I am yet undecided if i would release it as an upgrade to Horizon[ON] and incrase it's price or as a seperate package.


    Here are a few screens of the wip buildings just thrown into the Horizon[ON] example scene:

    Horizon01.jpg
    Horizon02.jpg
    Horizon04.jpg
    Horizon07.jpg

    Little bit different topic but same direction, i also messing with a simplistic volumetric cloud solution that may be something for the assetstore or an upgrage to Horizon[ON]. Here is a short test capture from our game showing the clouds over Horizon[ON]:

    The buildings in this video are from another package which i improved a bit but i am still not happy with the quality, so that is the main reason for the new skyscrapers. Clouds need more love as well but all in all i think it's quite promising.

    Please let me know if there is interest for the buildings and/or clouds and if you'd rather see them as upgrade to Horizon[ON] with bit increased price or as seperate package(s).

    Cheers,
    Peter
     
  23. Cactus_on_Fire

    Cactus_on_Fire

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    That looks frikkin amazing I must say :D
     
    Becoming likes this.
  24. hopeful

    hopeful

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    Buildings are something I have always planned doing with Horizon[ON], very similar to your approach. (See page one of this thread, nearly two years ago. lol) It doesn't seem like something very complicated to do, but if you have a full solution or even just a demo added to Horizon[ON], that's great. I would probably prefer to do my own building models in a way that fits within Horizon[ON] technology, as there are a lot of different building styles to use (in terms of architectural styles, but also function, like warehouses and malls in addition to skyscrapers), but I don't mind collecting whatever sample art you might provide. I do like the way you have building lights that change over time; I think that's something I'd like to do.

    I would probably also do some other things for the city, like have an optional sidewalk pad below each building, and a street layer, for those places where such would be in view (like where the player is at a higher elevation, looking down on the surrounding horizon).

    Something like this could also be used as part of a night time city solution: SpriteLights.

    For me, the volumetric clouds are nice, but less important. They do add a great accent to your excellent flight video. :)
     
  25. docsavage

    docsavage

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    @Becoming,

    Really like these buildings. I think they a very important feature as currently HorizonOn is great for doing vast wilderness areas as is but this shows it is great for vast cities and metropolis type games/scenes. Good quality buildings you have there too. I think you should add a small sample of buildings enough to show how to utilize them and sell larger packs as addons, or include a good complete pack and increase the price of horizonOn. Re the volumetric clouds it would be great to have if it's easy enough for you to implement and support. There are a lot of solutions to this on the store but I don't know how well the work with horizonOn so you would have an advantage.
     
  26. Cactus_on_Fire

    Cactus_on_Fire

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    I would agree with the rest. The thing that really makes the scenery are the buildings as well. You already got the natural landscape look with trees and all. But I would say that having buildings would make its appereance more lifelike
     
    docsavage likes this.
  27. jonfinlay

    jonfinlay

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    Great to see it being updated! I haven't got a night/day system with clouds yet so that would come in very handy if it were implemented.
     
    Last edited: May 27, 2016
  28. docsavage

    docsavage

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    @Becoming, Just watched the clip from your game. That's looks fantastic. Silky smooth and fast as well. If that's what using horizonOn can achieve you are seriously under selling your product.
     
  29. LynoHD

    LynoHD

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    Does this work with RTP? if so how can i combine the two?
    the RTP terrain shaders just replaces the Horizon shaders..
     
  30. Becoming

    Becoming

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    Wow, nice so much feedback! I'll answer one by one...
    Thx for your input :)

    For me the main thing is quality & performance, since skyscrapers and big modern buildings have a lot of surface area the usual way is not working without either sacrificing performance or quality. To overcome this issue my apporach for them is a bit similiar to a terrain shader but utilizing vertex colors and uvs to choose between different materials(stone/metal/glass) and sections of the atlas textures. Also i blend high res and low res detail and use some masks. the models them self are not really fancy but the tricky thing is to cater the shader with the models uv1/uv2 and vertex colors. I intend to do many generic buildings which are meant to fill the background scenery, but keep it at a high enough quality so it can be placed in close proximity to the reachable area of the levels. The really big thing for me about this approach is that everything can be combined/batched, as nothing kills performance more than drawcalls. This way we can put tons and tons of buildings with just one ore a few drawcalls, depending if occlusion culling/frustrum culling need to be considered.

    By the way fot those who dont know: The current version of horizon has already a more classical building shader (and buildings) included which can be missused for other things as well, e.g. some of the mountains in the video are from manufakturas background mountain pack, i just used the horizon building shader on them so they can receive snow and fog from horizon. The already included buildings can be quickly placed with the included placer script and it automatically combines/uncombines them too. Same goes for the included trees. The new Skyscrapers just take this up a notch or two.
    The Sprite lights are nice, thanks for the tip. It would be simple to include them directly and place them just like the Horizon[ON] Trees. Though, currently a horizon layer can have emission which i use for the street lights. So they would fulfill the same purpose but has the benefit of being able to place the light sources above the horizon.

    Here is a crop of another screen showing the emission street lights and the included buildings i mentioned above:
    Horizon08.jpg
    Foundations are a nice idea, i'll look into that.
    I agree, they add another layer of depth and they are definitely somehow related to backgrounds and therefore related to Horizon[ON]. They are not highest priority for me at the moment but a nice and fast drag and drop solution for more 3d looking clouds was long on my wishlist, after the scrapers i'll look more into them.
     
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  31. Becoming

    Becoming

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    Thanks! Horizon is actually already quite nice for cities too but i think its just a somewhat unique technique with horizon so people tend to only do things with it that are shown in the example scene. In our game we need to have arenas in the middle of a big futuristic city(and other places), so i hope that along the way i can create a few more examples for Horizon[ON].
    This idea with the sample + addons is great, i'll definitely consider doing that.
    The available cloud/sky solution work just fine with Horizon[ON] but all the ones that offer volumetric/or particle based clouds are too slow or do not bring the quality we want for our game, so we needed something faster .

    We use TimeOfDay in our game but it's clouds are just flat projectons on the skydome... they look nice but they do not have the depth that we want. The only solution that would look good enough for our needs is truesky but its quite slow probably also because it has more features than we need. My clouds are relatively simple but they look ok from above and below and even flying through them is quite ok. With some visual improvements and keeping the current simplicity, it would be a simple "drag and drop some coulds" thing for us, that looks good and is fast.

    I do not intend to make a full sky solution, there are others that studied and nailed the atmospheric scattering very well, also i do not want to compete with existing solutions, rather i would like to add the clouds in addition or as a replacement of, let's say, the flat clouds of TimeOfDay. Stand alone clouds so to speak.

    First come the Skyscrapers though :)
     
  32. Becoming

    Becoming

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    Thanks, yeah, absolutely! I wanted to leave it to the users to place their custom stuff on Horizon[ON] (and they still should do, customization goes a long way for unique games ;)) but i see that with skyscrapers there is a nieche. If there was a good pack already available i would gladly use it for our game.
     
  33. Becoming

    Becoming

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    Haha, you tell me... I just fail with the marketing, i don't mind underpricing it but i would love to see it used more often as its really powerfull and has much more usecases than most would think. the funny thing is i was working in marketing for quite some time before i moved to games. but i guess the saying goes: the shoemakers personal shoes are the worst... at least in german such a saying exists. I want to improve in this area before Horizon[ON] completely drowns in the mass of the assetstore.
     
    Tethys likes this.
  34. Becoming

    Becoming

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    Yes and i encourage everyone to use RTP for their terrains. RTP would not replace Horizon[ON] shaders though but Horizon[ON] is placed outside of your terrains... unless you do a flight sim or strategy game, then Horizon[ON] alone would do just fine.

    Take a look at the webplayer demo(Post 1 in this thread) and play with the buttons to get a better understanding of what horizon actually is ;)
     
  35. Becoming

    Becoming

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    Maybe i should mention that i do not intend to make a full sky solution but just clouds... the example scene of horizon has a rudimentary daytime script but its basically just to show how Horizon[ON] reacts to light. I would recommend to use a sky solution that has atmospheric scattering eg. TimeOfDay. We use it in our game(as seen in the video few posts above) and are quite happy with it, only the clouds of TOD we are not 100% happy with... they are great and all but we need something with more depth to it and also we want to be able to be above the clouds as some of our arenas are a bit like the city in the clouds from starwars episode V...

    So, dont hesitate to get a day/night/sky system. Good atmospheric scattering alone makes a big difference ;)
     
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  36. VicToMeyeZR

    VicToMeyeZR

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    Wait..... That's and in-engine screen shot?
     
  37. jonfinlay

    jonfinlay

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    Yes, Time of Day is the one I'm planning to buy. The important thing is that Horizon[ON] is being updated, it's a great software and has huge potential to develop even further as your newest screenshots show. One thing which I think it would benefit from though, as we discussed in an email some time ago is a rudimentary shadow system. For example a plane could cast shadows from a great height, would be good to see this implemented somehow without a performance impact.
     
  38. docsavage

    docsavage

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    I like that german saying about the shoes. My main job is fabrication and welding and you should see the state of my house front gate:)

    I think video tutorials covering not only different aspects of the pack but usage is needed as it will sell the product more as well as showing us what it can really do.

    Re the clouds have you seen this. -
    https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/33271.

    It's on my wishlist and I have feeling it could be good at clouds. Not affiliated etc just looks like a nice tool.

    Thanks

    doc
     
  39. Becoming

    Becoming

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    Thanks! I remember our discussions though not the part about shadows, as currently horizon already can cast & receive shadows without problems. Only thing is that if you have shadow caster/receivers that are far far away from the scene origin or the casters are very big it can degrade shadow quality, but that is a unity limitation and there is nothing i can do... Horizon is already split in parts so it limits these issues as much as possible.

    Yes, actually its just a 800x300 crop of a 1080p screenshot... it is the out of the box example scene of Horizon[ON] and unity's FPS counter gives me ~1400fps :D... of course that is unity's crappy fps counter, though even with a proper fps counter you'll hardly see a differnece in fps compared to an empty unity scene.

    On a side note: unlike all screens on the assetstore or the ones posted prior to this thread page i used anti aliasing, bloom, and color correction image fx on these screens(Horizon[ON] is fast enough that using image fx or AA is no problem at all), anyway the difference to no image fx is actually very small as you can see if you try the webplayer demo(no imagefx used there):

    WEBPLAYER

    (note that the skyscrapers are not part of it, at least yet)
     
  40. Becoming

    Becoming

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    yeah, you are right, just an hour ago i recorded a looong tutorial only to notice that my microphone was not working :(
    I know that this is really needed to improve sales.

    That type of particle field i made my self for our game it runs entirely on the gpu, repeats itself forever based on camera position and supports translucency, we use it for rain and snow, however forget about using it for clouds, overdraw will kill the performance... its only good for small particles like snowflakes/raindrops/pollen/spacedebris... such things. It's actually part of our "topsecret" tech to give our game an advantage to others, seeing that others have released a similiar system makes me rethink if we shouldn't put our solution on the store... i'll have to discuss with the team. Thanks for the link.
     
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  41. docsavage

    docsavage

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    Thanks for the info. Really nice looking product that and if you are using something similar shows it's worth even more consideration.

    Talking about clouds I bought this the last week - https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/60955. Absolutely fantastic and a bargain. The dev does some really nice tools. The cloud technique he uses flies on my system ii is really fast. The lightening he uses from his procedural lightening pack works great as expected as that's top kit and looks great in the clouds. My only concern is how well it gets on with HorizonOn as the sky he uses needs the camera far increased to about 10000 at the moment. I tried them together and the snow effect with horizonOn with snow and they look great but I was wondering if by changing the camera far to such a high value am I losing some of the gains with HorizonOn?

    shame about the video. Sounds like nightmare.

    Thanks
     
  42. Becoming

    Becoming

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    I dont see a problem as horizon also needs to have a long far clip plane, usually the far clip plane does not matter so much, with unity it is the near clip plane that causes issues. Unity does not have a linearized depth buffer which makes it loose a lot of precision in the very close distance to the camera. For our game, Tom who made RTP, experimented with reverse and linearized zbuffers and it solves pretty much all problems with zfighting, only issue is that all shaders need to be converted... it would have been great if unity used a linearized zbuffer right from the start, as i have no hope that unity will change it now or in the future... to many assets from the store would be affected.

    Anyway, that asset looks nice, unforunately it does not really give use that AAA next gen feel that we are after.
     
  43. docsavage

    docsavage

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    Thanks @Becoming. Not sure what all that means but trust you:) Looking forward to seeing what you are all coming up with for TC2 as well.
     
  44. hopeful

    hopeful

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    I was thinking of using the emissive lighting for near-horizon street lights too. So nice to see your screen shot of it in action. Beautiful! :)

    Where the Sprite Lights might come into play is to represent distant night details when you get to a higher altitude / far-horizon.
     
    Last edited: May 28, 2016
  45. Becoming

    Becoming

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    Here is the first of a series of Videos for Horizon[ON]:

     
  46. jonfinlay

    jonfinlay

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    Great, thanks a lot for doing that video. I personally prefer PDF documents, the one you did was perfect. Although videos are a useful complement and ideal for sharing professional tips. One of the most difficult parts of using Horizon isn't so much the software itself, but the artistic challenges involved particularly in getting the mask to line up exactly with the terrain especially when the terrain has rivers. Not to mention tips on how to decide how much it should tile, etc. Videos are perfect for sharing odd bits of advice like that and for demonstrating the thought processes involved in setting up the horizon. Although the new TC2 should make it somewhat easier, as I believe it allows the exporting of useful height and colour maps.
     
    Last edited: May 29, 2016
  47. Becoming

    Becoming

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    Yeah definitely, TC2 will be great, Nathaniel works hard on it to make it the best terrain creation tool ever, i also have my humble part on it, we talked countless days about the workflow and we really evaluated every possible way to make it as easy as possible and still maintain/increase its possiblities.

    For the artistic side and content creation for Horizon[ON], i want to make a few videos on such things, topic by topic.
     
  48. Teila

    Teila

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    Great video! I would love to see some videos are creating your own masks for the horizon areas. I am guessing your video used the default and that it is possible to create your own as well. If I had a terrain in the desert, it might not match the default. I understand the concept of the layered masks, but a very simple tutorial showing one created would be nice.
     
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  49. Becoming

    Becoming

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    Yes, i am indeed using the default mask in the overview video and it is of course possible to use your own, like pretty much everything in Horizon[ON] it can be customized. I have planned to make a video on masks, the process of creating masks is pretty straight forward but i have some neat tips to share. I hope that i can make it interesting for beginners as well as advanced users.
     
  50. BackwoodsGaming

    BackwoodsGaming

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    Great! This is one of the things that I ran into and didn't really have time to dig through and figure out. I have an island environment and I wanted my masks to be able to match up to distant terrain that has been culled out of the scene when I use Sectr. Is this something you might cover in the masking video for those of us that have larger terrains and do some type of streaming. Would be really cool if we had multiple terrains loaded in the editor if we could somehow get a snapshot mask of terrains surrounding the selected terrain.

    At any rate, great to see some videos coming through! :)
     
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