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

So, I´ve been toying around with MapMagic the last few days and it´s a lot of fun. I have some questions / requests, though:

1. There there no way to limit the upper slope ?
It would be great to have a slope range modifier ! Also, a height clamp modifier would be handy.

2. Can I select multiple nodes somehow ?
Rectangle selection would be perfect.

3. Is it possible to copy or dublicate nodes ?

4. I´m using Distingo for my terrains. While it is possible to attach the script to a pinned terrain, it is not working for endless terrains. Is there a way to make it compatible ?

Also, tutorials regarding forests and splitter would be appreciated

Thanks !

 

1. Do you mean to limit the maximum land incline? Btw height could be clamped with a curve.
2. Well, there is no such thing as a "selected node" in MM - you do not select a node before dragging it. But I've got your point - it could be handy to move several nodes at once. I plan to add a special node groups - a special rectangle areas on the graph that will be moved with all the including generators.
3. I plan to make a node and group save and load features, and I think it will be possible to make a node cloning in scope of that feature.
4. I can make it this way: you can assign a script to the MM object, and then all of the scripts from this object (except MM itself) will be copied to the terrains on their enable. How about such an option?

Hold on, tutorials are on their way!

 

Ah Nice....... Looking forward to the new Tutorials

 

What I meant by that was the possibility to limit the lower and the upper slope limit.
Say, for placing objects just in a certain range from 15 to 25 degrees angle for example.
Like in this shot from world machine:

I guess that would help and I´d like to try this ! Right now, I can just attacht the script to already pinned terrain, so that would help.

@Hellhound_01:
Thanks a bunch for the noise generator ! It works great on single terrains. But as soon as I activate umlimited terrain with your noise, I get a compile error and I need to shut down unity completly. Wasn´t sure if you are aware of that or if it´s just me...!

 

@Wright I do not have a clue what you mean concretely. What do you mean by temporary output?

@ SecondSight Could you give me more details about this compile error? Do you use the actual version from the repository which includes the fix for the spectral weights calculation?

 

@Hellbound_01
I´ll reproduce it later once I´m home. I´m using these files from your link: https://bitbucket.org/Hellhound_01/mapmagic-extensions/downloads. Regarding the compile error: I can´t say much about that, since Unity is stuck in this error and I have to shut it down via task manager. So I don´t have acces to the console in that moment. If I remember correctly, it just says: generation array error. But I´ll try to varify that later.

 

Hellhound_01,

Code (CSharp):

1. public Output output = new Output("Output", InoutType.Map); //the main output
2. public Output previewOut = new Output("Preview", InoutType.Map); //debug output for the preview,
3.  
4. public override IEnumerable<Output> Outputs() { yield return output; yield return previewOut }

in generate function you can do something like

Code (CSharp):

1. Matrix torrentsMap = new Matrix();
2. //calculate torrents
3. previewOut.SetObject(chunk, torrentsMap);
4.  

SecondSight, a Slope generator can do this. Just use it as a map input in a scatter generator.
A slight difference: instead min and max the slope it has a Steepness and a Range values. Min = steepness - range/2, Max = steepness + range/2. So, for instance, steepness=10 and range=4 are the same as min=8 and max=12.

 

@Wright Thanks Denis, this was the missing link. The preview works like charm now.

 

I've created a bug fix for the actual fractal noise generator: https://bitbucket.org/Hellhound_01/mapmagic-extensions. This fix solves a crash detected by SecondSight with noise generation when using Unity play-mode.

 

Don’t mention it, it is me who should thank you for your generator! Keep up doing a great work!

Some of the users found out that the formula I gave is incorrect. The slope generator designed the way that the min value is always zero. Range just determines the amount of blending between selected and non-selected values. Sorry for misinformation.
I'm going to make minimum value changeable in the next versions.

 

Recently purchased Map Magic and its a great tool.

1. I understand an island is possible to make with a raw file on a single "tile", but what about included with the procedural terrain? for example... if I were to pin the borders of my island and manually create the shoreline, would map magic be able to procedurally fill in the center tiles while ignoring the outer ones?



2. Is there a way to enter a value that would generate a specific range of terrain chunks instead of having to "pin" each individually? For example...generate a 15x15 sized map

3. Is there a way to "pin" a terrain chunk at runtime? Lets say the terrain is modified at runtime, currently if that terrain is unloaded and loaded back in, the default values remain. Having the ability to pin the terrain at runtime could be helpful.

5. Any plans for "stamping" if it doesnt already exist? By that I mean, if I were to use the object scatter in your node graph, modifying the terrain that is directly below it. Using the scatter node to spawn in houses and also flattening the terrain below that object.

4. An api/tutorial of some kind would be helpful as I have a few modifications I would like to make to your system to better fit my needs. Even a simple explanation of the process map magic takes. "Pinning the terrain is a function called from ABC and does XYZ"

 

Thanks!

1. raw input works in a bit different way than per tile or terrain. You've got to make an un-detailed map of your island and stretch it to all of your 15*15 km area by setting raw input scale to 15. More info could be found in this post.
2. 15*15 grid is a 225 terrains. I don't even know if there is a hardware that can load 225 fully detailed terrains at once, with all the grass, trees, objects, etc (are you going to place them, right?). And it will take a lot of time to generate them. It is ok to have 10 pinned terrains, not even 100 - and let the other terrains load dynamically.
3. to pin a terrain with a script you can call MapMagic.instance.terrains.Nail(x,z) - "nail" is the way pin called internally - where x and z are terrain coordinates (not a position: for the terrain at 2000,-1000 the coordinate will be 2,-1 when the terrain size is 1000). I've got making an essential api description on my roadmap.
4. "stamping" exists. It is done with a stamp generator. Just assign a heightmap as a "canvas" and your objects list as an "objects" input, and turn the "maximum height" off.

 

Perfect, and yeh 15x15 is a lot, but it was just a number I threw out there for example. I am interested in exploring the raw input technique you described. Thanks for the response

 

My mistake about the stamp and the docs, I didnt read through the entire manual until just recently, its all there!

 

I spent a good chunk of the day getting familiar with Map Magic, and am impressed with how powerful it really is. Here is what I came up with after a few hours of trial and error.



You can see the whole album here.

Hats off to @Hellhound_01 for the extra generators - I made use of his fractal noise stuff in this scene, and highly recommend it.

 

Thanks for the flowers, nice to see that the generator works as expected. You have done an amazing work, I like you valleys with the height mountains in the background. Could you give us some details, how you realized this (it looks like you have used Ridged noise in combination with some billow noise)? Do you use some additional assets?

 

Jacob Williams, Whoa, that looks really amazing! Every single screenshot from the album worth publishing in thread (but my favorite is the second one)! The terrain looks not so inclined that makes it very playable, and the mountains in the distance bring the feeling that it all happens in mountainside. It's a valuable combination. Great job!

 

I just used your FractalNoise, @Hellhound_01 - perlin ridged, which looked fine on first play through, but then it seems something has broken, as what was once a quite detailed map now looks (in preview and in game/in editor) to be a blurred low detail noise map. I've tried regenerating and turning nodes on and off and I can't get it back. I did manage to recreate the node and get it back by copying the values, but:

Also noticed that terrain segments which auto generated outside of the initial pinned terrain are also blurry as above. So the pinned one was fine, all generated are blurry.

And once again after one play through the perlin ridged was lost and replaced with a blurry noise looking image.

One more question - how is the speed of this compared to voronoi and normal noise? It seemed to take longer to generate is that right?

@Wright re the whole thing about taking a script from the root MM game object and applying to all terrains, I'd also like to see that. Could use it for anything from terrain scripts to stuff like, for example if I wanted all terrain pieces to be forced to a certain LOD (ie never use top detail level).

 

unboxing Map Magic .. first infinite world

 

@Hellhound_01 - Much easier to show you than to explain. Here are the nodes used for the heightmap.


As for the assets, the trees, shurbs, and some of the flower patches are SpeedTree. The rocks, grass, and other flowers are from the asset store. The sky and clouds are Time of Day. The terrain textures have been sitting on my drive for some time now. I think they came from GameTextures.com, and the UV scaling is handled with Distingo.

@Wright - Thanks for the kind words. Anything I post to the forum you're free to use for promo or anything else. For those of you who didn't look at the album, here is the image he was talking about.


I'm working on a few basic biomes at the moment and testing performance. The next thing on my list is a barren desert area. I will post some more images when it is complete.

 

I've played a little bit with my generator and stumble upon a new issue. I've figured out that I sometimes got with pinned terrains (and regular in play-mode) a noise generation issue at the border edges. It's look like the seamless noise generation is broken at those edges and I got a hard cut between the old and new terrain with a gap at the height values. It's hard to explain, by this reason let speak some images.

The first image shows the first pinned terrain. The second one shows a new pinned terrain with some irregular looking fractals at the border (marked red), the third image shows the same issue from rotated view. More strange, at the fourth image the issue is nearly gone, after I've regenerated the complete node graph by pressing the generate button at the editor. But you can also see that the pinned terrain has changed, what I couldn't explain, because at noise generation anything should be equals if you use the same seed.

To check the play-mode I've placed my camera directly at the border of my pinned terrain and removed the second one, to force the regeneration of the removed terrain directly at start of the play-mode. In this case I got also a gap between both terrains, which looks like the third image. I guess this is the same issue I got before I regenerate the complete node graph (which I couldn't in play-mode).

@Jacob Williams Could you give me an example what you mean with blurry? And maybe could your reproduce this effect with a smaller graph?

Edit: I could enclose the issue. I've figured out that the issue only occurs with fractal noise values. Billow and ridged noise works as expected (after a fix for ridged noise), there is only a little stitching at the border edges.

I checked the fractal noise generator against billow noise. The main difference is the absolute noise value calculation. If I use this also, than I could remove the gap, but the fractal noise value looks nearly the same than the billow noise. Any Idea why the remaining value could produce this gap?

 

sarum, I'm really impressed. Such a great result at almost the first MM launch!

Hellhound_01, I don't know what causes an error, but I guess what interferes finding it - it is the terrain welding. Try turning the terrain welding off - by setting the Height Weld Margins in settings to zero.
And maybe it is a good idea to view the noise output as a map preview - it displays the map without any processing - to find out if this error is caused either by MM or by your generator.

 

@Hellhound_01 - I noticed the same issue with welding. I thought it was a MM bug and reported it to Wright, but I'm glad we know what generator is causing it. It seems like you are all over it, but please let me know when you have an updated version of the generator to test.

 

@Wright Thanks for the hint with the welding. I've set the welding to zero as mentioned and create two previews, rotated by 180 degree and combined. As you can see, the issue comes from the generator. I've actually no idea why, but there is a little difference between the noise values at the border edges. I could confirm again that this issue only exists with fractal noise values. This is weird ...

@Jacob Williams I've uploaded a first fix which resolves the issue with billow and ridged noise. You will be notified if I could fix this issue.

 

@Wright I found two possible errors:

1st: You cannot reduce the resolution directly to a lower level i.e. from 512x512 to 128x128. In this case Unity (Using 5.3.4f1 (64bit)) crashes. If I perform this reduction step-by-step (512, 256, 128 ...) anything is fine.

2nd: I could not see the "Save To Texture"-button in the Preview-Window. I've to comment the layout par definitions directly atop the if condition of the button to got it visible.

Could you confirm this?

 

So, I´ve made base setup for my feature terrain yesterday. It´s pretty much a template with scattered woods on "generic mountain terrain" But I guess I learned MapMagic that way.








If I have time I´ll make a webdemo. By the way...: Is it possible to start and stop generation on runtime ?
Via script if a button is pressed ?

 

@Wright @Jacob Williams I`ve implemented a first fix, available for download. This fix solves an issue with value shadowing. If you use a welding of 15 and regenerate the entire node graph the fractal noise looks better (If you pin a single chunk the gap is already there until complete regeneration). It's still not correct. Actually I can't figure out, why I have no seamless noise at the chunk border edges. Hope I find a solution soon ... Now it's time for a nap.

@secondsight_ Gosh, that's fantastic. Great job. I like the second picture with the lake. The last one with the fog is also awesome! It's a little bit scary (I could imagine something moving in the foggy underwood).

 

I spent some time today working on a "rainforest" setup. Still struggling with a good trade-off between detail and performance.





@secondsight_ - Really love your trees and grass. Where did those come from?

 

Hellhound_01, I can confirm the both issues. Adding them in my to-do list.

secondsight, fantastic! Such a scenic mountains in the background! Gorgeous!
And I should agree that the misty fog at the last screen looks really cool.
Disabling the MapMagic script will prevent generating the new terrains. If some terrains are generating in a background - it will not stop generating immediately, but will not apply the terrains once they are ready.

Jacob Williams, great, but personally I like the first album more - there was a nice combination of a far scenic views with a close details.

 

Thanks a bunch ! Had a ton of fun doing that over the weekend and testing around alot.
I also had the idea to spawn particles, sound triggers and other gameplay objects via MapMagic. And it worked great ! So now I can spawn butterflies over flowers and trigger sounds when in a forest. Again, great tool !

Anyways, I´ve finished a small demo.
It´s a single terrain only, because Distingo is not supported for multiterrains. So they look very flat in comparison. Will update the demo once it´s possible. There are some animals scattered around (by hand :/) and a few environment zones for color variance (the foggy region is in the north).

www.andrethiel.de/Uploads/MapMagicBase.rar
Move = WASD, Sprint = SHIFT, Jump = Space

I thought I might share this shot as well:


Sadly spawning animals on a navmesh did not work. I´ve tried to scatter a bunch of roaming animals in the forests and floored them to the terrain. In the editor window the position looks right, but when I start I get errors that agents are not placed on the navmesh (setdestination failed).

@Jacob Williams
The grasses are some homegrown stuff
The trees are from the asset store. https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/2817

edit: added links

 

I'm also getting Unity crashes when trying to change heightmap resolution using HellHound's noise. Seems that 1024 is ok, 512 is ok, 256 or lower crashes. I tried going from 512 to 256 as well but no good.

With the latest version I'm still getting border issues too, and have to try clear them by pinning/unpinning or regenerating. Some terrain segments seem to just generate a big block.

No longer completely losing my settings though (and getting that low-res noise version) which is progress

 

I'm suspect that crash on the resolution change is MapMagic bug, not HellHound's noise. I could reproduce it with standard generators only, with no custom generators even installed. Going to find out what causes it.

 

i am really blown away with MapMagic .. infinite worlds are mesmerizing .. bravo denis !!!

nice demo secondsight

 

nice demo secondsight
ditto that, could you post a readable shot of your nodes please? How did you place the animals, plugins, your
own scripts, etc.?
Is the camera supposed to move very slow?

 

This is a fantastic first release and a very powerful toolset. Especially considering the object distribution functions too. Well done. I have had some issues but I think they have all been mentioned by others in the thread.

Are there callable functions to force updating of nearby terrains but preventing it whilst the game is in play? Say if I have the user teleport to a new area I could black out the screen and generate nearby terrains during a brief interlude rather than automatically during gameplay? I'm working on a VR project so it's important that the framerate remains stable during play.

Has anyone figured out how to post-process terrains that have just been generated in-game? For instance using assets like Distingo and MeshMaterializer https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/28583 ?

Few random screenshots of work in progress.

 

i also use distingo and i really would like to see it working with infinite terrains too

 

So I edited my terrain, raise lower, then pressed 'generate' edits disappeared, there's no post-editing of terrains?

 

Also, ● Stratum a terrain heightmap. The objects use it to determine height at their position.
In the node editor it's 'substrate' same thing? anyway, where do I hook this to? I have the rocks scattered but
not on the terrain. Floor output would go to 'height'?

 

Try hooking the Floor substrate to the output of your Voronoi.

 

The camera is supposed to be slow. But then there is always sprint

So, here are some shots how I scatter game(play) objects. That worked pretty much with everything I´ve tested so far, except agents that require a nav mesh. In that case I get errors and it seems that generated agents are not recognized and not placed correctly on the navmesh. I can go in detail about that... maybe Denis can take a look at this ? Because that would be awsome to have for certain kind of games.

Anyhow... here is an example of scattering particles:

I base all my object distribution on the textures. So I can define exactly what trees and other objects should be found there. This can also be gameplay relevant objects like resources (food, wood etc.) or sound triggers. So actually with MapMagic you can generate everything that can be found in a forest based on the texture position. Example here some leave particles:

I scatter a pink ball (spawn sphere) as a placeholder and generate them on the forest floor. The scatter input is leading to the forest texture (out of picture)


Next I give some offset to the spawn positions. Sound triggers instead should be spawned on ground level of course.


Then I replace the spawn sphere asset with my particle. Note, that you should set the scaling and the rotation of your objects based on your particle to make it look correct and emit in the right direction. Also, you might want to reduce the scatter amount And here it´s ingame:

 

Thanks so much! It's really cool to know that my work gets such a feedback!

Thanks, I'm glad to know that object generators are appreciated!

There is a static event before applying anything to the terrain - it's called OnApply (with a ApplyCallback (Terrain terrain, object obj) delegate). So you can pre-process terrains and what is going to be applied with your scripts:

Code (CSharp):

1. public void OnEnable ()
2. {
3.     MapMagic.OnApply -= MyPreProcess; //just in case it was not called on disable somehow
4.     MapMagic.OnApply += MyPreProcess;
5. }
6.  
7. public void OnDisable ()
8. {
9.     MapMagic.OnApply -= MyPreProcess;
10. }
11.  
12. public void MyPreProcess (Terrain terrain, object obj)
13. {
14.     //processing heightmap
15.     if (obj is float[,]) //terrain.terrainData.SetHeights recieve float[,] as heightmap
16.     {
17.         float[,] heightmap = (float[,])obj;
18.         //do something with heightmap
19.         //or set the terrain layer
20.         //or assign some script to terrain
21.     }
22.  
23.     //processing splatmap
24.     if (obj is float[,,]) //alphamap is float[,,]
25.     {
26.         float[,,] splatmap = (float[,,])obj;
27.         //do something with splatmap
28.         //don't assign a script here if it is already assigned in heightmap
29.     }
30.  
31.     //processing grass
32.     if (obj is int[][,]) {}
33. }

I'm not sure that something like OnAfterApply is needed in this case, but I'm going to add it anyways. It will be called once all of the apply complete.

hike1, yes, stratum and substrate are the same things.
Re-generating MM will erase all of the manually edited pinned terrains. Otherwise the new terrains generated will not weld with the pinned ones. I think I need to add some warning, or make some locking feature... it's still unclear.

secondsight, I've missed - what's wrong with the animals. Since they are usual prefabs they could be scattered with generator and created with objects output the same way other objects do. Have you encountered some problems with that?

 

@SecondSight, thanks for the scatter shots. What kind of ai scripts do you have on the animals? I like the way that
deer bounces around on the cliffs at the beginning.

 

I´ve attached an old AI roaming script I´ve found to the animals. Here is a link (save as...)

@rpgw: Looks interesting and trippy Mind sharing a demo once you have somthing ? I own a DK2 and I´m always looking for new content !

 

Do you know when the shoreline generator is go ing to come? We have been waiting on it =)

 

Heh thanks. It's more dark fantasy at the moment but I know what you mean with all the floating rocks and stuff. Believe me they look -huge- floating above your head.
Yeh I could do demo builds of some kind... though it will be room scale Vive rather than DK2.

 

I plan to release v1.2 in a week or so. Among the shore generator it will include a long list of improvements of such a kind. But note that it will take some time for Unity to review it (usually lesser than a week).

But since we've talking about shore line I'll tease you with some screens. Maybe they are not so gorgeous, I was just walking along the shore making screenshots in a places I found picturesque:

​

 

Couple of questions...
Firstly I'm having an issue with the webgl build. Loading the scene up in a browser crashes, although if I create a small pinned map with say 4 terrains, it works ok. Using the legacy web plugin instead of webgl works great. Obviously you have to turn off multithreading (but seem to remember this option is removed when using the legacy plugin build). This is with the demo scene.

Also can someone throw some pointers on how to deal with the floating point limitations when working with mapmagic? In the past Ive been using world streamer to deal with this so understand the basics of moving the objects, just not sure how to deal with the mapmagic side of things. If I move the camera (and other objects) wont mapmagic render/create the wrong terrain tile as it will think we are back at the origin?

Loving this product, as I need a massive terrain, all other solutions that require generating the terrains at design time have so many issues, including time to generate the terrains and size of the data on the disk.

 

You can turn multithreading off by turning off "Multithreaded" in MM object settings.

But WebGL build actually can work with the multithreading. I guess that the memory limit is the cause of the crash. After raising WebGL Memory Size in Publishing Settings to 1600 I could make a build that works in multithreaded mode. If you are going to use a default memory size then try lowering MM resolution. WebGL requirements are often oblige to make some sacrifice.

You can move MM object at any time and distance - no matter if it is going to start generate terrains, generating them or applying generated data. It has such a feature in it's initial design. You can even make a camera-centric world coordinate - by moving all the world each frame with a static camera.

 

@SecondSight
Thanks for that script, it looks like I need an Animator that goes from Idle to Walk (run?) with a speed parameter. Could
you show a shot of your Animator graph and parameters please?

 

@Jacob Williams @Exbleative I've used the last few days try to fix the welding issue. I think I got it !

It looks like the inverse lerp after noise calculation to get the values in range [0,1] has produced those gaps. I've uploaded a new version of the fractal noise generator:

1. This version fixes the issue with the fractal noise generation.
2. Billow noise is still working but without the inverse lerp it's more flatten. I think it's ok.
3. Ridged noise is still working, but I'm not happy with the result. I think I've to modify it.

I would like to hear your opinion about those fixes. Now it's time for a nap...