89 replies to this topic

[johnmeyer]

Sreesor, iare you a CF BETA guy, and if so have you played on those terrains in game? Was just wondering how you were finding the performance when loading in these additional assets. 

[SReesor]

I wish I was John...but no. For now I look at FPS and the tri's/verts in any given scene view as I roam around. Aquas water out of the box seems to me to not have a significant performance hit, but again let me qualify my remarks- I have very limited experience in this regard.

Objects I use sparingly thus far and focus on low poly assets; the Volumetric Fog did not impact fps in my working project at all. None of the trees are SpeedTree either.

When Course Forge is released to the rest of us, I am sure I will experience a rude awakening on performance hits and what is require to optimize the design once the CF asset is imported into the project.

Until then, I continue to play in Unity trying to achieve a look that satisfies the eye...then keep a watchful eye on the metrics we do know to watch for.

Really looking to getting CF and seeing what will happen. I do respect the current designers with CF and everything they offer up in the Forum, and enjoy playing the courses we do have. I must admit also that since working in Unity I look at the PP courses and user created courses from an entirely different perspective. I really look at textures, frame rates, plantings, imagination along with the actual golf course architecture.

Long winded response I know...

[johnmeyer]

You will undoubted be a very strong asset in that department, and I look forward to seeing what you come up with.

[DPRoberts]

Aquas water out of the box seems to me to not have a significant performance hit, but again let me qualify my remarks- I have very limited experience in this regard.

SReesor, your course work looks good. I have been experimenting with some peripheral assets in CF and wanted to let you know that I have struggled a bit to get AQUAS water to appear correctly in game with CF. Mike has said that 3rd party scripting can have issues. AQUAS runs a reflection script and my guess that is the problem. I want to get RTPv3 but worry the scripts issue will prevent things from appearing correct or even prevent compiling a build. I just want to caution you on buying too many things only to find they don't play nicely with CF. It could be my error but it's how I currently understand it from a post with Mike in the beta forum. I'm hoping I'm either wrong or we can figure a work around because I can envision making some really neat terrains with a few asset store tools.

[Crow357]

Yeah, if a Unity Asset requires scripts to work, 99% odds, it will not work in game due to scripting being blocked by PG.

[SReesor]

Good to know! Thanks gentlemen for the heads up. 

Will make some adjustments! 

[Mike Jones]

Gaia scripts can all be deleted as they are not needed once the terrain is created and populated so there is no reason why it cannot be used with CourseForge. We will endeavor to support the best third party assets if possible once they have proven to be of use.

 

PS, CourseForge is pretty low impact in regard to performance, most of the performance in PG is taken up by the vegetation, terrain and reflections if they are enabled.

[SReesor]

Thanks for the input Mike (especially regarding the performance impact of CF).

Question then regarding assets to work:

I assume then adding global fog (script) to the main scene camera would not be considered the same as say adding Tendoku Dynamic Sky?

What asset is PG using as the Dynamic Sky? 

[slouis]

I installed Unity, version 5.2.3f1 and checked out a tutorial on You Tube about creating terrain using Unity for beginners.  In the tutorial he used Photoshop.  Is Photoshop necessary to render  terrain?  He went to Goggle and picked an island height map to work with.  Is it possible to use Goggle Earth for the layout of the course?

I believe Mike indicated that there would be some tutorials available for Course Forge. 

From watching the tutorial it looks like there is a lot to learn in Unity.

[Kablammo11]

A terrain in Unity (and anywhere else) is defined by two separate elements:

 

1) Its elevation geometry, aka a height map, which contains all data about the relative altitude of grid points. Raw elevation data can be downloaded from the internet and then translated into a height map. For fictional courses, this is not necessary.

 

2) It's texture(s) that add natural surfaces to the terrain.

 

Photoshop is not necessary to render terrain. However, it (or any other graphics editor like Gimp, which is free) might be required to edit textures or combine satellite pictures into one terrain overlay texture. For fictional courses, Photoshop (or any other graphics editor like Gimp, which is free) can also be used to create a grayscale height map in RAW format.

 

Combining the above two element into a realistic representation of a real course is a rather tricky bit: They both need to be at the same scale and have to match each other perfectly. For more details, go look for "Terrain Forge".

 

Summary: There absolutely IS a lot to learn in Unity and yes, you can create courses without having Photoshop.