Hi Michelis, I was wondering when you might be revisiting terrain? As much as I like the wyrdforest terrain which looks good … the 4 texture layers seems too limiting for what I want to do. After many months in the wyrd terrain, it just looks so static even though I randomize it every time and can deform it to place roads that aren’t too wonky.
It would be amazing if it were possible to have more layers and allow for cells on the terrain to have different textures (like you do now) but also allowing a palette of textures that map to an indexed-color image. This could be in addition to the terrain sensitive mapping you do. Maybe they blend together, or one covers the other. Then you could dynamically have different terrain coloring/texture, like vegetation, or mud, sand, whatever., based on a map image instead of or addition to being based on the terrain steepness and heights. After a forest fire an area could be painted with ‘burnt’ color/texture from the palette. Edits to the indexed-color image (or loading different ones), dynamically update the terrain texture. Is this feasible?
Sorry for such delay in answering! This was never forgotten, just on my TODO list to answer
I indeed want to get to terrains back. The current features are nice, but not what I eventually want – which is more-or-less feature set of Unity terrains. In particular, editing terrains heights in the editor, and painting the texture layers in the editor.
The indexed-color image you mention – I thing this matches the common term for it splatmap , see e.g.
We indeed want to use it. I edited our “roadmap” section " 12. Terrain features (in particular, editing terrain in CGE editor)" to spell out many details of what we want to do about terrains: Roadmap | Manual | Castle Game Engine
As for when – I am not sure. Terrains are cool, they are a great tool for building worlds – our map designs often naturally start from terrains. So terrains are super-important. At the same time, we have other TODOs – I’d say that new materials, 7.0 release, web platform take priority. More or lesss. And terrains are next. This can put “new terrain” work sometime at the beginning of 2025, if things go right.
I trust that your plans and priorities are the best.
I don’t know that my thoughts about having ‘indexed’ palette of terrain textures is splatmaps. I am thinking of ‘2d’ tiled grid overlayed onto the 3d terrain. So one pixel in the map might be a value that connects to the sand texture at the corresponding location on the terrain. And another pixel might be the rocky texture with a different value. Then you can have a wide variety of dynamic textures, so that you can ‘paint’ snow over everything, or have a sand dune spread. If the image is 256 color like indexed gif… then you can support 256 textures. Or a 4bit image could support 16textures. My goal is a dynamic world, so being able to modify the texture index image in-game and see the terrain textures change (like if you dig a hole in a location) would be really cool. Maybe splatmaps come into play when combining texture, perhaps at edges between colors on the texture index image. I am less concerned about that… your current mechanism for blending layers looks great.
So if these tiles 4 squares were each just represented by a pixel in a paletted image mapped to the same grid as the current terrain textures (not necessarily aligning to the triangles as these do).
