How about open sourcing the new Official Unity Terrain System ?

Reading through the official terrain system thread, I see there are so many different requests for different projects (mobile, caves, streaming....)

In the last few years I have seen many terrain systems come up with success, for mobile systems, voxel based and a number of tools to improve the existing terrain system.

If all this effort could be somehow coordinated by Unity in an opensource community project this would greatly benefit the community and current doubts on when the new system will be released.

Maybe we might come up with several terrain systems under a common terrain interface, one for mobile, a voxel terrain, a standard terrain, and a landscaping system that might allow for combining several terrains types in a single logical entity.
I am pretty sure that tanks to the community we would come up with several generation tools and paid add-ons, such as procedural, heightmap based, manually carved etc...

Also on the shader side, we have seen some incredible work done that could be more easily integrated in an open source project.

I am ready to help as I believe many others are... what do you think ?

Fred

 

I'm keen to play with this. I have no idea how one actually goes about doing a project of this magnitude.

 

....why would any of that be a "paid add-on"?

 

I was thinking about advanced terrain addons, just to keep asset store providers in business...

if it is free all the better...

@BoredMoron, I am suggesting helping Unity devs in doing their terrain system with community support, there are a number of very talented developers in here...

 

Well, nothing is actually stopping you from already gathering a group of developers and build a terrain system together. People have already been extending Unity, and have created tools to distribute to other developers, for a while now.

 

That's what I was thinking this post was about. There are all sorts of complications with open sourcing Unity itself. There are plenty of developer who have built terrain stuff.

My thought was the OP was offering to drive an effort to get those developer together on something bigger then any individual could do. If that's what this about then I'm in. I don't have the time of resources to organise such a project, but I can contribute.

If this is another thread about how making Unity open soure would magically make every system perfect I'm out. Go look at how awesome Blender is.

 

In addition to what BoredMormon says, from where I stand, a "random" open source terrain effort would either a) still struggle with the terrain engine internal issues - fixing those are supposedly the whole point of Unity's upcoming terrain engine update? Or b) have to throw out the baby with the bath water, and reimplement the whole thing themselves - is it possible to do that entirely in C#? Maybe. If not, there's always native code plugins. But it still has the smell of reinventing the wheel - at the same time that UT is already fixing the original wheel.

I'm thinking it would make more sense for an open source terrain team to have actual communication with the UT engine team, with the potential to discuss road blocking bugs or limitations, rather than building a major bypass to get around them.

Not least considering that it appears even the most prolific terrain asset developers (RTP3, AFS, TerrainComposer etc.) still can do nothing but cross their fingers, hoping some road block will eventually get fixed, before they can implement a requested feature.

Don't think it's about open sourcing any of the Unity internals - just that a Unity coordinated effort on the C#/shader side is much more likely to gain traction than some "random" open source initiative - particularly if there's actually open communication. Pretty much like the open source UI, but at an earlier point in the process. The open sourced UI may be all C#, but in the end it still also depends on native code engine internals.