Map Magic World Generator - a node based procedural and infinite game map tool

Maybe when it will merge with voxeland

Try applying some blur on the map, not too much (around sub tile scale?)

A general question, will voxeland have transvoxel implementation for LOD?

 

Nothing other than basic Noise and Voronoi inputs.

There are no Safe Borders to set.

Here's a dropbox link with the nodes and data.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/cnkzyh23gmwf6fu/AAC1N07y8Nhv0j_wAhzKNPaia?dl=0

 

Hey there,

I´ve just updated to 1.7. Good news is that I don´t experience any RAW input lag anymore, even on large maps.
The bad news is, I get some sort of graphical glitches or lodding errors.

Everytime the tile height is modified, I get this result:


When I go closer or far away, those edges disappear for good.


But in general, the whole terrain is constantly lodding strangly. So this might be related.
(Pixelerror is set to 1 and no texture is used here: )


Does any one else experienced this ? You have an idea, Wright ?

Edit: The edges also disappear if I force generate all.

 

when i export terrain into unity package and then import into other project terrain is not visible..it say terrain data is missing ? any one know the solution ?

 

Voxeland does not use marching cubes algorithm, so transvoxel make no sense there.

secondsight_, sometimes I encounter these artifacts in Unity 5.4 (but never saw them in my main Unity version - 5.2). As soon as I start to hunt them they disappear after deserialization (i.e. code change), so it is extremely hard to determine if the bug fixed. Some kind of curse. But I'm aware of this bug and every time I notice these seams I try to make it 100% reproducible - and as soon as I make it I will fix it.

hitman40786, what tools do you use to export terrains? Have you tried terrain data exporter from this post? It could be downloaded here. Just assign it to the terrain object and press "export" - it works like a button.

 

Hi, I'm loving the plugin, but I'm wondering if there's a better way to work with large numbers of trees and grass and such.

I know there's soft caps on the number of ground textures, every 4 textures it has to run the shader again (so I limited it to 16 ground textures), is there a similar thing with the number of grass textures or trees? There's probably about 30-40 grass textures, and easily that amount of trees.

Some of the trees will be moved to the Object output instead of the Tree output, but even with (say 20-30) of them, is there anything special I should do?

I've had a look at the biome method, but until I get the final numbers of object types and such sorted, I figured it would be easier to keep track of everything by having it all in one graph.

 

We can't see the detail of your screenshot, but you know you can have multiple instances of the same type of output? So you can create all your conifer trees routed to one tree output, all your oaks and ashes routed to another tree output, all your apple and cherry trees routed to another tree output etc. etc. rather than try to have that many slots of a single tree output generator.

 

I....did not know that. Might have to look into that, the Tree output was getting so big with just the 4 biomes I'd set up so far.

 

Is there anyway to generate an .obj? or to easily migrate the geometry into another project.

 

hi @Wright can you explain how the rtp integration exactly works? how can I reorder layers that I already have? the RTP node inside map magic says a tip "To Add, remove or change layer order use Relief Terrain component.

I've found the "add layer" and "remove layer" buttons inside relief terrain component but it doesn't have any "move up/move down/ reorder" buttons, so how can I reorder them?

 

does object grass work, if so is there an explanation on how to use them ?

when i try them nothing happens but billboard and textures work.

 

I've got biomes working using just masks and blends, no biome in/outs.... I was trying to make desert only spawn in place of grasslands, and got it to work, that's why I wasn't using biomes which would just disregard grass or mountain... this is causes desert to wrap around mountains though =/ which I don't like...

putting my thinking cap back on...

 

does anyone have a good way for mixing tons of grass? the split works great for trees and rocks and stuff, but what for grass? I'm using tons of noises with different seeds and it is a messy section of the graph to say the least!

 

Uh huh - same here

 

XD exactly

In lieu of which I'd like to suggest a curve output option... something that was really useful in TerrainComposer2. Basically you add options and then you set their min max so when the curve is less than 0.5 it goes to output A, when the curve is above 0.5 it goes to output B.

I currently am doing it by hand above, and it would be nice in the future if there was a tool to handle that. That would let us output grass by setting as many options as we need and only using one noise generator. Having a "blend level" setting is also of course important, so instead of blending across 0.5-> A(0,1 | 0.4,1 | 0.6,0) B(0.4,0 | 0.6,1 | 1,1) you can just set A and B to meet at 0.5 and set the blend to 0.1

 

@malkere :

Glad to see it can work as-is using curves.

@Wright :
Sounds really good to have logic gates in MapMagic somewhere.
Without them -- at best, it's not pretty -- at worst, it's not friendly...

 

malkere, in your case there is a solution that fits perfectly: the Normalize Generator:

You can use the same noise and curves, but in this case it is not necessary to synchronize curves to make their sum equal to 1 - Normalize Generator will do it automatically (note that it is set to Layered mode on the screenshot):


awesomedata, could you please describe the way logic gates could be used? I guess you were talking about malkere's biome selector - it would be cool if you could draw some kind of pseudo-graph with logic gates that solve this problem.

Jesus, I think I can make Object Output to have only one scatter connection and to select layer at random for each layer. This can replace all those "ribbon cable" connection from scatter generators with the pretty single link.

Vortavasail, object grass works the same way the standard or billboard one. If you can paint your object using the standard terrain painting tools then it could be used for the Grass Output. But keep in mind that Unity limits the number of vertices per grass chunk, displaying only the part of the chunk when vertex count exceeds 65k I suppose. So I'd recommend you starting grass object experiments using the low density values.

Cleverlie, as far as I can say there is no way to change the layer order in RTP other than manually reassigning textures. At first glance it seemed that it could be done in a Coverage panel, but actually it's just used for splat map generation. I will remove mention about layer change from RTP Output's helpbox.

 

ya that would cover up any mistakes in my curves if there were any, it'd be nice to do the multiple curve breaks on a single generator though

 

Yes, nice idea. That should be pretty trivial to create as a custom generator.

 

I have a reproducible example of this splat weld margin issue:
https://gyazo.com/44fc4bbec2b8986ef6a4f1936984fa76

I'm using unity 5.4.1f1

Import the nodegraph i provide into mapmagic

set terrain height to 30

populate the texture nodes with something.

set the map seed to 2100

pin cell -1,-1 and -2,-1

 

I am very new to Unity, so I know I have to attach this script to "something". What would be the proper way of running this script?

 

In this video:

at 0:25 you dragged and dropped BadlandsData. What is this "BadlandsData"? Did you prefab this?

 

@Wright :

The logic gates would be something that evaluates a variable/value (taken from some gameobject in the scene) that outputs either a single OR multiple options depending upon what the variable or variables evaluate to.

You could have an "equals" or "greater-than" logic gate option (on the same logic gate's node-form) that would evaluate whether one or multiple variables have input that is both, in this case, equal to one value and either that variable (or another's) value is greater-than another value (OR variable) before the next node in the sequence would be allowed to combine with the previous sequentially-connected-node's input in the sequence.

Equally invaluable to that would be a single node taking a single variable input across a range of variable outputs (instead of just a single output like the previously described logic gate) and checking these in a very similar manner, outputting different combinations of nodes with the input nodes -- all depending upon the value of the variable input. Sort of like layers, but a heck of a lot more powerful since textures/terrain/etc. would now be able to change dependent upon gameplay too!

A good example is day turning to night -- or even realtime erosion! -- or just any times when you may want textures to be swapped with other textures/maps or change objects/algorithms depending upon the state of the game at the time. Just imagine, say, a sanity meter where mountains appear taller and textures more demonizing and foreboding (along a variable such as a curve) depending upon how mentally unfit you are. Or what if you want to simulate a more broken-looking or barren world for a portion of the game, then change it up in-realtime to a more modern or less-decayed state for a cinematic? Pretty amazing possibilities imo with a system like this.

 

Once MapMagic is imported into your project add it into your scene by going to the GameObject menu -> 3D Object - > MapMagic. Or you can just create an empty transform (right-click in hierarchy and select Create Empty, or GameObject menu -> Create Empty. Then select the new GameObject and in the Inspector click AddComponent and type in MapMagic to attach the MapMagic script (or any script or component) to the GameObject.

That is a biome (a GeneratorsAsset, or saved editor data) he hand crafted for the demo video that is not included with the asset.

 

Heya @Wright. Currently it looks like MapMagic doesn't support common ancestors for biomes - for instance, if we have a node tree containing biomes A and B, and they both contain biome C, it will all fall apart as they don't know how to blend anymore. Thoughts?

 

Is there a limit for the number of biomes or the number of textures in them?

Can i use the Biomes also with RTP and will there be limits too?

I read that i can make for example a terrain that is 400 km but how does it work with unitys floating point error problem?

How can i import my own paintet hightmaps that i paint for example with Photoshop?

 

Hey hey!
This asset looks pretty awesome, still i got some questions before i purchase it:

How about villages? I havent seen any small villages in all your shots i think.
I dont wannt to have huge citys in my map but dayz like villages would be nice, generated of course. Not placed by hands.
Or can i do something like: build a village in unity, save it as prefab and then let it get placed random somewhere in each chunk?

Roads: actually the same question like the village stuff. Is it possible to connect several villages with roads?

 

Roads are not a part of the asset, but you could script eassyroads or anything to build roads between different points in your world. Knowing where different roads need to be built in a procedural world is a bit more difficult.

Villages can be placed the same as rocks or other objects, and can automatically propogate stuff around them. I would suggest you just spawn an empty game object with a custom village generation script attached to it that would then generate the village using raycast checks and random item choices. You could random place it to with the asset, but you would want to adjust everythings height, unless you change the height of the land where you place it too. Not super super easy, but I don't know of any assets that will do that super easy, though most can do it if you want to.

There's no hard imit, but every 4 textures is another shader pass slowing every framedown. no limit to biomes either, they just get harder, and layeredbiomes seems to be messy (cowtrix postsabove) texture limits with RTP probably need to be global, not biome separate. floating point error correction is not currently implemented into this asset. I will be working on that ina month or two and will share it if i build it before Wrightdoes.

 

thanks for the info. i think the only problem i see is that roads shouldnt go through trees, rather sneak its way around them. do you have tried eassyroads before? if not, no problem - but if so you maybe have some hints for me in place

okay, sounds good to me - didn't expect it to work out of the box.
is there a way to erase everything that is underneath a gameobject? i can see the same problems like with the roads, that a house is suddenly inside a tree or something.
also, can you flatten everything that is under a gameobject? so that a house wont stuck inside a hill.

i think that would be the best solution for both. roads and villages. to have the terrain generated like it is now but then somehow carve the area where the village will be


anyway, thanks already for your answers!

 

@Der_Kevin I'll be honest with you in that I haven't personally played with changing height around in MapMagic much, though it's in the manual.
http://www.denispahunov.ru/MapMagic/Manual.html
the Stamp section. certainly something I want to get into later for the same thing. sucks having your model stick out the side of a cliff. I'm pretty sure you could make sure there is nothing under an object as well though I haven't tried to set it up. Maybe put those items down first, then make sure to use the space around them added to a gobal "don't touch me" mask that everything else takes into account. @Wright can probably answer that better than me. I've certainly done it all with scripting before, but it would be nice to just have it running first pass through MapMagic.

 

ah, thanks!
the stamps look interesting and at first sight its what i wanted.
thank you!

 

I don't know about roads and trees, but for the villages, there are two things you can do:

There's a Stamp node that, while usually used to place things around other things, you might be able to us to flatten out the 'village seed' area in terms of height. I think you should then be able to reuse that (and a subtract node) and subtract away any objects like trees and boulders and what not.

 

iam using this tool now:

just have to figure out how to generate a road/loft at runtime between two points (villages) but its possible

edit:
yes, works

 

I´ve noticed some strange behaviour lately (V 1.7) while rendering / generating the terrain.
It might be related to the bug I have posted earlier.

It seems to me, that the terrain in the viewport is not refreshed correctly while generating.
So let´s say I modify the terrain, the editor window is generating. But in the main viewport the terrain is not changing. That is until I click into the window or activate "Pin terrain" and hover over the terrain tiles. Suddenly the rendered changes are visible instantly.

I´ve noticed this under Unity 5.4.0 using MM 1,7 under Win10.

Edit: adding shots:

1) I´ve disabled the grass in the node graph. After that MM is generating endlessly.


2) As soon as I select MM and then click on "Pin Terrain", the generation stops and all changes are instantly visible.


So be honest, with these refreshing bugs, it´s nearly impossible to work in a productive way, since I never know what is generated and if my changes are actually visible.

Does anyone else has this kind of problems ? Or is it just me on my PC ?

 

Here is how do I see a village creation:

• I'm taking the demo scene (non-island one) as a basis. I scatter some some rare objects that would be the village centers and increase their radius so that they fill all of the village square:
  
  Although it's not shown at the graph, I'd like to recommend you using higher Safe Borders values in Scatter Generator to prevent "cutting" your village with a terrain edge. This value should be comparable with village size, 100 will be okay in this case.
  
  
• Then I flatten the village land using the Flatten Generator:
  
  
  
• Now we've got the flat land to place houses, but it's filled with other objects like trees and stones. I remove all of them using the Subtract Generator - it removes all of the Input objects within some distance from Subtrahend ones. And since we've got several objects types each will require it's own subtract generator:
  
  I was too lazy to subtract bushes, but they are subtracted the same way the other objects do.
  
  
• Now I'm going to make "village map". It will be used to scatter houses and to draw village splatmaps. I'm using the Blob Generator to do that - it paints the input objects with round brush stroke:
  
  In addition to the Blob setup indicated on screen I'd like to recommend making it a bit more diverse (not a perfect round shape) by adjusting noise parameters: for instance, making noise amount (A) 1 and size (S) 10.
  
  
• Finally I'd like to scatter houses. I'm using the Scatter Generator in Hex Cell mode with big uniformity parameter (up to 1). This places houses in a hexagonal grid, but it will not be noticeable further. Moreover I'm using Clean Up generator to get rid of all the houses that are out of the village Blob, but as I write this I realize that it's better to use Scatter Generator's probability mask instead for that:
  

 

• The next thing I do is randomizing the houses by changing their types and rotations:
  
  
  
• Now you can notice that the village is filled with a grass - there are no roads or paths between the houses. Firstly I'm going to fill village background texture with some kind of sand (temporary using yellow grass for that and adding it to already existing yellow grass with Blend Generator):
  
  
  
• And now I'm drawing blobs under the houses with an already mentioned Blob Generator and subtracting those blobs with a Blend:
  

And here is what the village is finally looks like (and it's final graph):


I'm sure that it's not the only way to make a village - you can do some further enhancements with some house randomizer script or third-party tools for making the roads. But I hope that it's a good basis to start with.

 

wow, thats awesome!
thanks!

do you maybe also have a hints for the roads?
like i said before, i plan to use megashapes and it looks like this at the moment:


but i am not sure if that works with a random world since it somehow should/needs to avoid also really high mountains and somehow go around it. its also pretty performance heavy. so i think painted roads/paths on the terrain would be the better approach?
thanks again!

Edit:
After some research i think the best aproach would be an A* pathfinding algorithm for roads/paths like it is written in here: http://blog.runevision.com/2016/03/note-on-creating-natural-paths-in.html?m=1

The result is quite nice



But way to complicated for me to understand and i can understand that mapmagic cant do something like this out of the box, ... or?

edit 2:
after messing a little bit around with A* i really starting to like that approach

the biggest question is now. how do i give the path informations over to MapMagic so that it will paint Paths and even lower/raise some parts of the terrain?

 

I don't really know if Megashapes could be used on procedural terrains because it has to do some adjustments to flatten the land for the roads. If it has some function for that that could be called on OnApplyCompleted event than it could work, but anyways it will require some scripting.

With all those village tutorial pics I've nearly missed secondsight_'s gorgeous screens:

There's an error saying something about TonemappingColorGrading is missing. Could it be related with the bug? Anyways I've got to see the full graph to determine what is wrong, could you please send it to mail@denispahunov.ru? The only bug I'm aware of is that MM in some cases can never end generating in editor when scene view window is disabled, but as far as I can see scene view is enabled and selected.

Theoretically there is no limit for the number of biomes or number of textures, but keep in mind that increasing that number can hit the performance when generating or rendering terrains. If the biome is used on the terrain (even in some tiny arae with low visibility) it will take it's time to generate and will apply the textures to the terrain. However, MMWG skips those biomes that are not used at some chunk (terrain), and do not apply textures if they are not used either - unless RTP Output Generator is used.

RTP Output Generator does not optimize the textures used on the terrain. I dont really know what is the maximum RTP texture number limit (8 textures or 12?), but they all should be used for all the biomes.

MMWG has no built-in floating origin feature, but there are plenty solutions on the Internet, and there are free ones among them. You can take a look at this script (http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php?title=Floating_Origin).

You can use Raw or Texture Input Generators for that.

MMWG does not support nested biomes at all - currently there is no way to make the biome inside the other biome to generate. In this case it's possible to optimize the generate process by skipping the ones that are not used on the terrain. To find if nested biomes should be generated you'll have to generate the parent biome, and this will make all of the biomes generate.

PS here is one more village screen that I like:

 

Since the problem of road have been bring back again, I have been putting together a proof of concept for local creation of infinite network, this image is a naive implementation, I working on putting something more visually structured (city like) than this example image made with naive implementation, it has some really long chain, but I want to introduce more control in the connectiveness later:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/m8p75tsu5edk3m5/Capture d'écran 2016-11-04 00.27.05.png?dl=0


Global points and large distance (nested hash) can be handled too. I would be interesting if this can be implemented within map magic (I'll try soon, when I have jump around some structural hurdle).

 

Are you refering to the screens on this page ?
https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/m...ral-and-infinite-game-map-tool.390920/page-11

I don´t think the node setup is the problem here since it´s very basic and nothing special. But I can send it to you anyways.
But I have an idea what could be the problem, but cannot check it right now: I only have these problems on my working PC, with two screens. And I usually have the MM editor window on my second screen. So maybe this could lead to refreshing problems ? Window is active but on another screen ?

Will check this tomorrow and let you know or send you the file.

 

Hi all,

Wright, is it possible that you would make YouTube video 'Blending 3 biomes together' using raw input. I tried to integrate this video with raw input without good result. It seems to behave little differently when using raw input.

 

Henzu88, there's nothing special in Raw Input and biomes, you can it instead noise or any other generator. Maybe if you could describe your problem - what is exactly what is exactly does not work - I could help with some advice.

I could not reproduce secondsight_'s bug. Is anyone else experiencing the same problem: MM is generating endlessly when disabling generator - and stops when pinning new terrain?

secondsight, does this happen in a clean project?

 

hey
i dont want to be too annoying, but have you seen my post edit here: https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/m...ite-game-map-tool.390920/page-19#post-2845868

i just wanna be sure that this is not something that is already in mapmagic, if not its fine, i will figure out how to do this on my own. just want to avoid to build something that is already there
or if its planed to add, do you have a rough ETA?

this is what i have so far:


so assumed all villages or a representing gameobject is a children of a gameobject:
- each villagepoint will get a script (AiPath.cs here) and calculates an A* path to the next village or which is next on the hierarchie (you can choose what method you want)
- A* will spit out an Array of Vector3
- all i have to do now is paint a path on the terrain from Element 0 to 1, from 1 to 2, 2 to 3 and so on. this is still not done since i have no clue yet how to paint from one Vec3 to another. but i will figure this out i guess

whats left?
somehow... put al this into map magic

 

@Hellhound_01 I returned to using your FractalNoise generator today and noticed an issue with changing Ridged Offset for a Perlin Ridged algorithm. I'll change that ridged offset number, but once I hit play, the number resets to 1.

Is anyone else having issues with blending multiple biomes together using RTP? I'm getting black material strips where certain biomes should be.

I'm also still not getting snow appearing on pinned terrains (RTP).

 

Hi,
what do you use as HeightVillage for the Portal ? Nice approach .. I like it ...

 

Yeah ... got it ... excellent approach ... I bought MapMagic few months ago, but never got time to explore for production use ...I've just started ... and nice cool start ..

 

Runtime created ...

 

Been using and loving MM for a while now. Only fair I post some WIP pictures...

One (just one) MM-powered Unity Terrain pictured. Shown is just under half the biomes, and I've turned the wolf's fur colour pattern off so it's easier to see.

Currently running into Unity Terrain issues, will likely load up RTP later and give that a crack (trees aren't playing nice with U5's ambient lighting and fog like I'd expect, for some reason). Also the draw calls, I finally dragged that down under 4000... I don't know what's causing batching problems, but I'll have to get onto it.

Apart from that, MM is an absolute joy to use.

 

Hi, i cant remember if this was brought up already, but i'd like to ask for a feature to deal with floating point issues on large landscapes.

Can we please have a coordenate offset feature in the map magic component? It shouldnt be too hard to get map magic to generate chunk 100,1 at 1,1 with a 99, 0 offset for example right?

That way we wont be hitting floating point issues when trying to load those parts of the mapmagic world. It wont be dynamic though it will allow resetting it though a loading screen.

 

just a few post above