Terrain/Texture editors...

[Wolfsong73]

Thought I'd start this topic to see if I could get some informative insight to something.

I'd recently been checking out Unreal Engine 4, Lumberyard (Crytek 3 I think?), Unity, and some other engines... basically looking for one that would best 'fit me like a glove' for prototyping and/or developing a full game. It's basically down to LW or Unity for me at this point... each has its pros and cons that I'm sorting through.

It struck me how wildly complex some engines are in the area of terrains and terrain materials, compared to others.

For example, with engines like Leadwerks and Neoaxis, or even Unity3D, for example, terrain is super straight-forward. Create the terrain, set some basic parameters, import a heightmap if appropriate, assign textures to the correct layer elements, and you're off and running in a few minutes, at most.

Then, I look at other engines like Unreal Engine 4 or Crytek and their terrain systems are just nuts. The amount of work required just to get a basic terrain setup - nevermind terrain materials - is mind-boggling to me. I was following a video tutorial on setting up a terrain in UE4 and finally just said "oh forget this.. this is ridiculous". 

What I'm wondering is... is there a good reason why UE4 and Crytek's terrain systems need to be so complex? I've seen other engines that allow you a lot of control over your terrain materials' appearance - Esenthel, for example, offers tons of control, and has a far more intuitive setup process, though it's a bit more involved than Leadwerks or Neoaxis to set up.

Are they doing anything that couldn't also be accomplished through Leadwerks system's approach, even if it means adding some more tools to the set?

Josh, or anyone else with first-hand understanding of this topic, could you provide some insight to this?

This isn't a veiled "which engine is better" post, and I'm not trying to start a religious debate over which is better. I'm just wondering  why the folks at Epic, or Crytek(Amazon) would go to such lengths to yield results that can be duplicated (or darn close anyway) through far more straight-forward and streamlined methods?

Thanks



 

[Wolfsong73]

Too odd of a question, I guess? Or too elusive of a reason, perhaps?

I'm just wondering if it just comes down to "this is just the route "Developer Here" chose to reach the same destination", or if there's really something more to it than that.

[gamecreator]

I don't think there's much more to it than that developers try to meet and anticipate customer demands and also what they feel will make their engine more useful.  Sometimes this fails.  Making something like terrain creation more complex could be any one of those.  It's kind of like having your engine support C/C++ or C# or Lua or your own custom script or no coding at all.  Neither is better than the other necessarily; they can each create great games if the engine is good, as long as there are customers with those demands to create them.

[Rick]

1 hour ago, Wolfsong73 said:

Too odd of a question, I guess? Or too elusive of a reason, perhaps?

I'm just wondering if it just comes down to "this is just the route "Developer Here" chose to reach the same destination", or if there's really something more to it than that.

You said in your original post "Josh, or anyone else with first-hand understanding of this topic, could you provide some insight to this". Since josh didn't respond and not many people have first hand experience with making game engines or terrain system, this would explain why you didn't get any answers. If you want people who don't really have any real experience give thier opinions you would have gotten a lot of responses

 

i think UE4 allows streaming terrains? LE does not. It's a lot more simple when it's just one terrain for the entire game vs having to stream terrains in at runtime and manage all that goes with that.

[Yue]

What I think is that engines are tools, just that. And depending on the skill level we can manipulate those tools or not. The fact is that there are much simpler tools, which seek to hoard a market of people who have no basis in programming, and others on the other hand are sold to programmers who can get the best advantage and advantage to the issue.

What may be easy for us for another is complicated, but at the level of detail, for example you get better use of a language like c ++ compared to a high level. That's what I think.

[Wolfsong73]

3 hours ago, Rick said:

You said in your original post "Josh, or anyone else with first-hand understanding of this topic, could you provide some insight to this". Since josh didn't respond and not many people have first hand experience with making game engines or terrain system, this would explain why you didn't get any answers. If you want people who don't really have any real experience give thier opinions you would have gotten a lot of responses

 

i think UE4 allows streaming terrains? LE does not. It's a lot more simple when it's just one terrain for the entire game vs having to stream terrains in at runtime and manage all that goes with that.

Well, not really. You interpreted it that way. I didn't mean it that way.

By first-hand understanding, it could be Josh (as someone who's programmed and, by extension, used such a system), as well as anyone else with experience using any of those other systems to an extent where they could say, for example, "for UE4 it makes sense how they do it because their system allows "this or that" which other editors don't, so they can get away with a simpler approach". It could literally just be that someone has had enough hands-on time with given editors to grasp why they're set up the way they are, etc.

And really, me specifically addressing Josh or people with extensive understanding of a topic doesn't preclude people with a point-of-view on the subject from offering their thoughts as well.

I get what you were coming from, but you were taking what I said a bit too literally :p.