Nystul wrote:
I like the performance optimizations though I find the StreamingWorld optimizations to be double-edged.
As far as I can see one main difference to previous versions is that the treadmill blocks of the world do not need to be loaded entirely before one can start to wander around. While this gives the positive effect of being able to start walking around earlier it implies several drawbacks:
-) during the phase in which the remaining blocks are loaded fps are considerable lower than usual (making the exploring a pain)
-) world loading is noticeable (newly loaded blocks pop in)
-) lod seams between blocks occur until the unity terrain neighboring assignment is done (which happens only after all blocks were loaded - this actually breaks the immersion for me)
Would like to hear what other people think about it - I can live with both implementations, but it is no win-win in my opinion
I've taken your feedback on board and tuned this a bit further. Terrain is no longer loaded by coroutine on init, only when streaming in new terrain. I've left locations and terrains uncoupled however which was the main benefit of the new structure. This eliminates the three problems you mention above, but still has the net effect of faster load times when teleporting/loading and smoothing out streaming.
I'm now working on improving speed and reducing memory footprint, along with support for higher resolution terrains. This required me to decouple the heightmap and tilemap objects from the one array, so you will need to slightly change your ImprovedTerrainSampler at some point, but it's an easy change. I'll provide examples as usual.
Finally, I'm working through the problems of offloading some of the more CPU-expensive bits to one or more shaders. This is more of a long term thing, but will make a huge difference to terrain layouts.
