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

secondsight, the terrain you've made looks great! The only thing that is not clear to me is why do you split your heightmap and splatmap to 6 pieces - it would make the graph a lot easier to read and process if you will use one file per input. Keep in mind that input generators not binded to terrain chunks, you don't have to use one input per chunk.

dlevel, I've tested MapMagic gameobject move and had not encountered any error. I've even tried to make a static player position and move the world every frame instead - and except a lag on moving 10k of objects there were no problems.

nikolai-niedermeier, unfortunately it seems to be that build patch mesh operation takes 4.5 seconds. I guess Unity did not expect it to be used in realtime.

 

The reason for this is to have a higher resolution per tile, especially the colormaps. This way I can render a multi tile output in worldmachine with 4096 (or higher) for each tile.

 

@dlevel Ah ya, for that purpose there's no problem in doing that I don't think, like wright said.

 

Hi,
I remade this island (secondside) and it works well. But in front of my camera (FPSController), there are particles dancing. They move back and forth. What is this defect?
Thanks for yout help

 

I have not seen such an effect, but it does not seems to be related with a terrain... if only it is some sort of a broken grass. Does this happens in a clear project, with no water asset installed? Does it still exists after disabling grass output?

 

The effect disappeared once I added grass. Strange.

 

@stigmamax are you using a special grass shader? It looks like it is drawing bright patches even when it should be dark. You don't notice it in the light parts of the images, but the same effects is everywhere.

 

@malkere I had not used grass yet

 

Hi all,
I have trouble placing trees. I would exclude areas. For example, a main island with trees and small islands around without trees.
Thanks

 

There are plenty of ways to do that: for instance, if small islands are plaaced around a main one you can use a cone simple form as a mask for tree scatter and forest generator. Or, if you are creating a non-infinite world then you can paint a raw/texturre mask for trees.And if there are some other changes in small islands except trees you can use biomes for them.

 

"you can paint a raw/texturre mask for trees"
Do you have a example please (I'm a noob) ? Thanks

 

Hi,
How to remove this visual defect? From a distance, it looks like the tree is floating on the horizon.
thanks

 

That'd be some alpha sorting problem. I recall there was a solution posted somewhere, wherein you would modify (assuming there was nothing transparent drawn under the water) the draw order of the water manually (making sure it was drawn last).

This can happen with any Unity terrain and trees. If you google for "Unity trees water sorting" you'll probably find a few methods.

-This is why I like to use solid deferred water-

 

Ok guys I plan on using this asset in my game production. But i need to know a few things first.
1: If i make a lets say 300km2 island. can i then pin all the terrain one by one to completely modify the looks by adding buildings roads and such or will that crash everything because it is too large. even if i tick hide pinned terrain.
if i Hide all items on the map as a child to the pinned terrain. (i dont need it to create procedual terrain on runtime just help create the map at a developer level)

Will this load only the terrain needed or will this crash everything. is this even possible.

2: How do you place roads that dont end up sticking through the terain tiles what asset is advised.

3: How do you add rivers do this asset surport this yet if not how ?

 

You cannot have 10km2 active let alone 300km2 that's way beyond modern computers. If you're hiding distant stuff I suppose you could, but that would be a REALLY heavy scene and not something that anyone would recommend. I think what you want to do is setup a sort of chunk system saved out to prefabs and load/unload those prefabs from the disk when you need them. You could bring them in and edit them manually when you want to and save them off when you're working on something else. That's 90,000km though... I suggest you start with 1 or 3x3 and find out how it can take months to get a single terrain painted and prepared manually. Are you just starting gamedev?

EasyRoads is the GoTo for roads and the free version is free so you can get a good look at how awesome it is.
EasyRoads is also a common GoTo for rivers as they're basically roads painted/shaped differently.

 

Hi,
I found this tutorial to place my trees but in the new version, "Floor" disappeared.
I know I can use "Relative Height" with the Object node, but where do I place it in this case?

Thanks !

 

Hi , looking for some help

I have a scene with the mapmagic terrain editor working like a charm for a long time.

Then next time i load the scene the shoreline is gone. Height set correctly, but no shoreline any more so no beach, no sand, trees underwater etc.

other scenes working fine, just this one is toast.

Any tips? I thought i understood the process unless this is a bug?

 

@stigmamax does that even produce trees? I think you need an input on the far left "probability" input, preferably from a curve adjusting your height output. You can then set 0-0.2 to zero for water or whatever you're water height is, or only 0.4-0.6 for a specific tree group, etc. I actually use the grass output instead of height input. Trees are automatically aligned to the terrain height and you can use Split generator to adjust their height/rotation/scale if they are capable of accepting such modifications.

@Belrick Can you show a picture of your node graph? You're sure the eye icon (hide/show) in the upper left of the Shore generator has not accidentally been turned off?

 

Hi,
I do not have many trees even though I put "Density" at 3 or 1000 in Forest. Why?

 

@malkere
Hi
I Upgraded to unity 5.6 and now none of my map magic is working including the demo and the tutorial

Fault occurs on generation of terrain in Map Magic editor. So changing anything or clicking force generate on any map magic terrain results in the loss of height properties from shoreline.

However the beach terrace creation still works.

 

Melohn, 300 square km is an extra huge map - unless you are making a flight simulator. For instance, here are the sizes of the popular games that I'm aware of:
- Skyrim - 40 sq km
- GTAV - 80 sq km
- Wild Hunt - 135 sq km, and it's really a huge world.
I'm pretty sure that it will not be possible to load this map with a first-person detail at once. You will have to stream it somehow. Try searching "World Streamer" on Asset Store.

stigmamax, Floor Generator is not used anymore at all - anywhere. It's not compatible with a biomes approach, so it was replaced with Object/Tree Output relative height parameter. Just connect your Subtract generators to Split directly.

Can you post a picture of your trees graph? It's hard to say why their quantity does not change greatly without seeing it.

Belrick, do you have any errors in the console? If you don't then can you open demo and island maps and generate them in a clear project (with only MM installed)?

 

Here is a screen for trees

 

Since you are using a mask for the scatter generator objects (trees) quantity is multiplied with the grass mask; and then is multiplied with an absolutely different height mask in a forest generator. This way the result is almost equal to zero.

Is there some particular reason why you are using different masks for scatter and forest generators? I'd like to recommend you using the same mask for both. If you are trying to make your trees grow only on grass areas above some particular height then you'd better blend this mask first using Blend node, and then use blend's output for both scatter and forest.

And in general I'd recommend you do not try to compile the complete graph and then try to find why doesn't it work. Try starting with something simple like Portal -> Curve -> Scatter -> Trees, and then insert Forest, Blend and other generators to this graph.

And do not hesitate to use a preview for masks and objects. It's a very powerful debugging tool that can literally make all of your graph flaws visible.

 

I thought that the idea with this was exactly that you can load 1 tile you are on lets say 2 km big. and then when you get close to another tile load this aswell. If i make all the buildings and such a parent to the tile as far as i understood from the tutorial video. Would this infact not hide everything not in the tile you are in? and then load them uppon getting near and hiding un used tiles and models?

or did i get this wrong.

I am use to playing Dayz where the map is 225 km2 acording to their wiki. but this was in the arma 2 engine.

I am new yes but i am trying to do the basics for my game and then use that to get others onboard im not going to do this alone that would be crazy.

About the flying actually yes i do intend that to be a possibility with planes and helis

but as i said above. As i can understand from the tutorial video.
all unpinned terrain load uppon proximity. so why would there be a limit to size at all? in theory

 

Thank you Wright. English is not my mother tongue and I have a hard time understanding everything.

 

You can parent objects to your terrains and they will enable/disable when hidden based on their range from the camera yes.

The problems are really just with the size you're talking about. Going over 10-20km in any direction will cause floating point errors because the physics math only uses seven digits so it becomes 1000.000 as opposed to 100.0000 And really just that 10x10 is already 100km which is a LOT of space to try and manage. Though if you really are set on doing any thing there is absolutely a way to do it.

The biggest thing I've learned in my now 5 years of game development is really to work as small as possible piece by piece. It's not what we want to do, but it's 1000 times more efficient than trying to go big from day one. Once things are in and working at 1km, make it work 3x3, once that works, make it work 20x20, once that works, make it work 300x300, would be a friendly suggestion, but just a suggestion ;p

I wanted to go big too and so chose to go procedural and is why MapMagic works the best for me hands down because my worlds are infinite. You can literally run for 10,000km in any direction and it will just continue loading mountains and monsters and runestones and lakes. But I had to choose to not place stuff manually and really go procedural to get there, so both ways have their ups and downs.

 

ok but lets say 20x 20 km thats still 400 km2 thats pretty big. but the idea that i make it tiled lets say 10 tiles x 10 tiles with 2km on each. then i work through those tiles one by one creating eachone as if it was the only one. but i am not sure i understand what you mean with the floating points error.

 

It's a common problem in Unity and other game engines. The math uses a seven digit number and so can be 1.000001 or 100000.1 etc. So the further you travel from zero, for example 10,000 unit, the less accurate it becomes. So at over 10,000 units if you have your hands or a weapon or something right in front of the camera it will start to jitter and it will get worse and worse the farther you travel. Usually games will either set their entire world back to zero periodically, or use doubles instead of singles which use twice as many digits. Unity does not use doubles though and it's not easy to force it to do so, from what I hear, though I've never tried it myself.... would be great if it did! It's been a long standing request from the community.

 

Floating point problem could be solved - maybe not easiely because of the particles, rigidbodies and custom scrripts, but at least there are basic solutions to start with on the Innternet. You can take a look at this script (http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php?title=Floating_Origin). Shortly it moves camera and all of the objects to world origin when camera is out of some threshold distance (while most of the code deals with particles and collision to avoid related bugs). Map Magic object could be moved to any position at any time, no matter if the terrains are generating or not. I've even experimented with static camera, moving terrain instead in demo scene - and it is still works.

The real problem is in serializing all of 300 sq km data. If you do not plan to adjust each chunk then it's okay - MapMagic will generate a terrain from scratch each time player or camera will approach them, so you will not have to serialize all of the terrains. I'd like to recommend you pinning and manually change only some key locations, leaving the majority of chunks auto-generated. In this case 300 sq km area is really possible.

BTW I'd also like to recommend you decreasing chunk size to 500-1000 units. Key locations seldom exeed this size, and there's no sense in keeping additional unchanged terrain data along with them.

 

Well if you look at the demo scene from Worldcomposer thats 900km2 in one scene. that dont seem to lag whatsoever. and i belive this is because it only loads the tile you are on and what you can kinda see at a time. i thought mapmagic was able to be used to create massive worlds. but this makes me wonder if it is the wrong program for what i need it to do. i thought not loading it all at once was going to stop the issues but this product apparently still cant handle that big a world even loading only 1 tile at a time

 

This is what i need :

That is huge!

 

Hello Denis,
I try to reproduce "IslandTutorial" but I can not use "blend (legacy)" as it is in the demo. I have only "blend" ordinary. How to do ?
thank you in advance

 

Melohn,

So does MapMagic. Except that it does not load a terrain, but generates it from scratch.
Pinning a terrain makes it constant, it is not removed when camera is away and therefore does not generate when camera comes closer. Consider "pinned" terrains are always visible - so pinning all of 300km2 will just enable all of your world at once, and that could not be very efficient.

stigmamax, here is an example of how legacy blend could be replaced with a new one:


New Blend generator becomes useful when you are going to mix multiple layers:


In your particular case legacy blend could be replaced with this one (note base and blend channels switched):

 

But there is a feture saying Hide pinned terrain. so it only shows when close its in the video Posted about mapmagic this is why i am confused you say it cant be done let me find the video and time:

at 1 hour 21 min he litteraly talks about this.
so did i misunderstand or did he in the video say that it do not take computing time with hiding far pinned terrain?

 

@Melohn the terrain in that video is actually 14km2 or four 7km2 terrains rendered at 4,000 resolution or 3.5meters per step. Most games use at least 1 or 2 meters per step, some use much higher detail at close range. The rest of the scene is being faked using lower resolutions. The 922km2 chunk is only rendering a step every 1,800 meters. That's actually how my game works too, but I only go to 48km, because 48km is really far away, unless you're making a space game or a flying game. I create a high res layer and a low res layer to render behind that.

The example in the video will not let you go outside of the 14km2 area though. TerrainComposer2 is also capable of enabling/disabling terrains as you move too I think, which is a tool by the creator of WorldCreator, I haven't used it for a while though.

The MapMagic tutorial video is 10kmx10km and yes is automatically enables/disables the pinned terrains if setup that way. They are pre-generated and locked until nearby yes.

If you tried to do it that way for 100kmx100 or 900kmx900km it would not work. You would need to load/unload the changes to the procedural terrain, or load/unload the terrains if you want to hand-craft them, or record and reapply the changes you made to them when they reload. You would also need to compensate for floating point errors by moving the world around when necessary. But you can do all of that, yes. It's all possible. MapMagic nor any terrain generator on the Asset Store has all of those capabilities built into them, but it is entirely possible.

Another thing you can do is to scale your character down. For example if you are a 50m long plane, make it actually only 5m, and then you world can go to 150km instead of 15km without floating point errors.

 

how do you know it is only 14km2 ? i dont see that in the video

 

Hello Denis,
I still have a problem to import a 16-bit raw file.
Here is the link for my raw: https://www.dropbox.com/s/37bxebywmkubf62/HMquest02.zip?dl=0
I think it is correct
Thanks

 

Melhhn, what type of game are you making that you need such a large area?

 

There's one thing that binds one Unity unit to one meter - gravity. It's 9.8 units per second^2, and if you will scale all of your world up or down you'll get incredibly fast or slow falling objects.
EDIT: my bad, they fixed it. Now you can change this value in Edit -> Project Settings -> Physics. But it's a trick question: do we have increase or decrease this value when scaling all of the world down?

Yeah, there's really an option to hide the terrains that are out of range. This just disable terrain game objects, saving you FPS, but this will not solve the serialization (i.e. save and load) problem. I have not made a test, so I might be mistaken, but it seems to me that Unity will load terrain data anyways even if the terrain is disabled. There is no streaming in Unity by default (however you might want to take a look for a third-party streaming solution like WorldStreamer or something).

stigmamax, it seems that your RAW file is:
1) three-channel
2) 8 bits per channel
You have to use grayscale 16bit raw with PC byte order instead. What software do you use to save it?

 

There are more videos on his channel where he shows how he made it.

 

Here's a few weird Map Magic things I've come across while working on my current project.

1. Billboard trees. Certain areas on my terrain have permanent billboard trees. Same trees on another terrain 2km away look fine. It's not related to distance from zero as the good trees are further away. This one is really doing my head in as nothing I've tried has fixed it. It's like this in both scene and game views.


2. Spikey backgrounds. Mostly only visible in the editor. They disappear when you hide MM so definitely related. Occasionally they are visible in game. Mostly not a problem but still weird.


3. Smeared grass. No idea. It only happened once in a build.


4. shaky shadows. No pic for this as it's only apparent when moving. The shadows shake around like someone bumped the light source. This seems related to distance from zero.

The project is a 16x16km MM terrain with RTP and Speedtrees.

 

I use Krita. I saved to png and I use ImageJ. I don't have Photoshop.

 

Hello! I have a few questions about MapMagic before making a purchase if you could help me out?

What I need is actually only the heightmap of the generated terrain to access if from the code, and then I will render it in some other method (top-down 2D). Is it possible to access only this data without rendering the whole terrain?

 

@stigmamax GIMP is a free tool that can save RAW. You can't use png because it's a compressed format and skips over as much data as it can.

@vooood69 You sure could rig that up, not necessarily something built right out of the box. @Wright is the creator, I'll let him answer any more than that.

 

stigmamax, I have not been aware of Krita, so I downloaded it to take a look. Nice tool, however I'm not quite happy with the brush lag when using Wacom. But it's a free tool and it can export 16 bit raw images, so I'm willing to overlook that.

To export raw image from Krita:
1. make your image square
2. set image color space to 16 bit integer grayscale in Image -> Properties:

3. draw your heightmap. Note that this step should be done only after you switch the color space, otherwise you can have a stairs effect in height.
4. export image as R16 Heightmap (.r16), set your image resolution and PC endiannes in a pop-up window:

5. import r16 in MapMagic, and if you are happy with it save it to assets.
I don't really know why but the imported image is rotated 90 degrees and flipped vertically, so take it into account when drawing your image.

Dorian-Dowse, that looks wierd, never encountered something similar to this. 16km is not the size that makes floating point effects such visible, but maybe SpeedTree or other asset impose their own limitations. MapMagic does not have a billboard engine and does not deal with billboards except just an assigning of Unity terrain tree prototypes. I'm not very familiar with SpeedTree, but maybe it's some kind of optimization that switches trees to billboards if their count exceeds some limit. Or maybe it is an issue with trees scale.

I'd like to recommend you trying to replace SpeedTree trees with the standard ones just for test purpose.

Shaky shadows are definitely related with floating point precision. Try increasing camera's near plane distance (and reducing far plane).

vooood69, you can get heightmap float[,] on terrain apply with using MapMagic's events, but it will create a terrain anyways. You can ignore that terrain by assigning non-rendered layer to MapMagic, however there will still be some overhead on applying terrain.

 

It's ok with Krita ans ImageJ !!!

 

I was away from MapMagic for a few versions and now I'm back, and trying to update my custom generators. Am I crazy, or didn't it used to automatically support custom generators by calling them through an interface? Now it looks like you call each one specifically by type everywhere in Chunk.cs like this:

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. if (type == typeof(HeightOutput)) e = HeightOutput.Apply(this);
3.                     else if (type == typeof(SplatOutput)) e = SplatOutput.Apply(this);
4.                     else if (type == typeof(ObjectOutput)) e = ObjectOutput.Apply(this);
5.                     else if (type == typeof(TreesOutput)) e = TreesOutput.Apply(this);
6.                     else if (type == typeof(GrassOutput)) e = GrassOutput.Apply(this);
7.                     else if (type == typeof(RTPOutput)) e = RTPOutput.Apply(this);

If we have custom generators, do we need to find all these spots and add the generators to the base code now? I want to make sure I'm not doing something dumb before I start modifying it.

 

No, no way, you don't have to find something or change MapMagic code if you are writing your custom generator! You just write it in a separate file and it just works, there's no need to sign it or something - unless you are going to do something very special.
As you can see, by no means all of the generators are listed here. It's a special case for an outputs to select proper apply couroutine. I must admit that it's not an elegant solution, and it is already replaced in the upcoming version, but as you can see Apply is a static IEnumerator, so it could not be assigned using an interface. And it's simple, and at least it works.

 

I had custom generators for outputting a ColorMap and HeightParallaxMap to RTP but they don't seem to be working anymore; I admit to being confused as to what would have to be moved into static Apply and Process calls instead of doing it all in generate... maybe I'll just hold off on updating these until the next MapMagic version if it's going to change again anyway. Could I suggest maybe adding a "MyCustomOutputGenerator" example to the code like you have for the regular non-output generator? Would make it much easier to figure out what goes where.

 

hey,

This is driving me crazy.I am trying to export the terrain to a new project after i have made changes on it manually.I have created a prefab of Map magic and exported the package.I locked the terrains i have edited before export them.Then, i have created a new project and install map magic, later i have installed the exported package .But every time doing this way or other , the terrain regenerates even if i locked it before export to a package, losing all my manual edition.
What is the best way to export the terrain and continue editing in a new project without loose the editions?.I have various terrains(multiterrain) and i want to edit them and continue using the enable/disable terrain feature near the player of map magic in the new project.

thanks a lot