a full circle strange sort of things occuring lately
attempting to go fully procedural for the planet creation with the help of a great series by Sabastain Lague. in retrospect, even though i have slowly been discovering the many benefits of working procedurally, i didnt exactly know this sort of thing was possible directly in Unity without some sort of third party implementation.
after spending time with Algorithmic products and integrating procedural into my texture workflow, I’ve slowly been trying to transition to procgen for my modeling needs with Houdini as well. not sure why it never occured to me to generate everything with code, right inside of Unity!
there have been a couple hurdles so far, like making the demo scripts work for multiple planets, but I think I have at least developed a workaround for now. the models are very high res, but a little bit of LOD is already built in via a resolution parameter in case I need it.
did a quick test to my low-end device to find loading up 3 planets takes a quite bit of time… making frequent returns to the world map a lengthy round trip endeavor. maybe its not as long as it feels… modern mobile games do tend to hang a bit on the loading screens, even on my higher end Pixel. need to try a more proper test with the loading bar in place.
it hasn’t exactly felt like the greatest progress lately, but if this is the road i needed to take to discover what I have found, so be it. i initially estimated spending quite a bit of time generating assets, but this will hopefully cut down on that figure, at least in regards to the world map/level select functionality.