How can I make a big island (open world style) with water surrounding it?
I don't think that adding a big water prefab (standard asset) to the center of the island with big scales is a good idea, because it would be always rendered to the user which uses high amount of resources.
Should I add more, different sized water prefabs to the shore?
Which one is a better practice?
A large water object placed under land won't be frustrum culled because some part of it exists in the camera frustrum (unless you look straight up). Because of this it will be part of the back-to-front drawing pipeline and thus is not efficient. This is the danger of using over-sized polygons and/or extremely large childless objects.
If the water consisted of a individual objects; each with its prefab and mesh; then objects "off screen" could be trivially culled. Therefore you should use multiple prefabs of sufficient size so as to cullable at times via the frustrum.
Use the water asset that comes with standard assets, make it large and just create your island ontop of it. Unity also only renders what the player can see in the frustum camera, so it wont render all the water (it used to as it was a bug but its been fixed now i think). You can also look into occlusion culling
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Hello everyone There is such a problem - I have a bottle sprite and a sprite showing the water level in this bottle. But, as you understand, if you start rotating the bottle, the level will remain the same. How to make the water rotate realistically? (was always downstairs)
As far as I understand, you probably need a shader, but I'm not strong at all.
I tried to make water in small circles with physics, but it works unstable and the balls periodically slip through the wall.
What I need
What I have
So long as you don't care about liquid sloshing and the volume staying consistent you can use a simple sprite mask.
Note that the box collider isn't necessary, it was just added to illustrate the underlying sprite size.
I'm looking for ways to clip an entire unity scene to a set of 4 planes. This is for an AR game, where I want to be able to zoom into a terrain, yet still have it only take up a given amount of space on a table (i.e: not extend over the edges of the table).
Thus far I've got clipping working as I want for the terrain and a water effect:
The above shows a much larger terrain being clipped to the size of the table. The other scene objects aren't clipped, since they use unmodifed standard shaders.
Here's a pic showing the terrain clipping in the editor.
You can see the clipping planes around the visible part of the terrain, and that other objects (trees etc) are not clipped and appear off the edge of the table.
The way I've done it involves adding parameters to each shader to define the clipping planes. This means customizing every shader I want to clip, which was fine when I was considering just terrain.
While this works, I'm not sure it's a great approach for hundreds of scene objects. I would need to modify whatever shaders I'm using, and then I'd have to be setting additional shader parameters every update for every object.
Not being an expert in Unity, I'm wondering if there are other approaches that are not "per shader" based that I might investigate?
The end goal is to render a scene within the bounds of some plane.
One easy way would be to use Box Colliders as triggers on each side of your plane. You could then turn off Renderers on objects staying in the trigger with OnTriggerEnter/OnTriggerStay and turn them on with OnTriggerExit.
You can also use Bounds.Contains.
I have a work-in-progress spaceship interior built with Unity (utilizing pre-built assets). It won't move much. The space around it will, similar to how I made an HTML/Three.js version of this concept (although linked example does move ship around space scene while scales are also animated).
With the three.js version, I was constantly fighting with "space" entering the ship; warp beams and planets colliding with the front info screen or passing through the chair (destroying the illusion of massive scale). I was able to resolve most issues, but it was a challenge when everything was in the same scene.
In Unity, is there a way to keep the ship scene separate from the surrounding space "scene", whether it is part of the same scene or in a separate one on another layer, or the same scene with masks that prevent overlap? I don't need a very literal answer, but any guidance that leads to a solution will be promptly accepted.
Yes, it's a very basic and useful aspect of Unity - the layers system.
As you guess you can find endless doco about it at Unity, cheers
Note too - Unity of course has superb occlusion culling built-in. Almost always this will "just work" for you.
Note that (if I read you right) you're doing a scene with a tremendous difference in scales (like "10 cm" objects AND "1000 km" objects at the same time). As you probably know you basically can't do this in a game engine, it's tricky to pull off.
Just BTW this is more a question for gamedev.com
When implementing a large hexagonal grid (256x256) of tiles in a Unity game, the game becomes very slow and hardly able to function. The hexagons are in a prefab. A script controls the size of the grid and the spacing between each hexagon. How does one go about rendering a 1024x1024 grid of Unity objects?
When the game is built on Win64 it is also still quite slow.
This is an image of hexagons rendered:
http://i.imgur.com/UbA6USt.png
Try making the grid elements static and make sure static batching is turned ON in player settings. This will optimize their rendering significantly. You probably should even go as far as combining them all into a single mesh (see tools like this one for that purpose).
If you can show us the actual scene hierarchy and the actual structure of your grid nodes then we can help even more.
Because of how Unity works, non-static objects have a tendency to get heavy - they each end up with their own transforms and end up getting drawn even when they're not on screen.
It's the reason more minecraft clones aren't seen coming out of Unity.
If you can't set the hexagons to static for some reason (i.e.: creating procedural levels etc), you'll have to perhaps simulate the hexagons through creative shader manipulation (like saving each mesh into a single array of vertices with a second that tracks a corresponding mesh id) or by writing a script that creates/adds vertices and faces to a single mesh on a single game object.
You may also speed up the scene by creating smaller levels and loading/unloading them as the player moves towards them. See: Application.LoadLevelAdditive
I'm attempting to build a Lunar Lander style game on the iPhone. I've got Cocos2D and I'm going to use Box2D. I'm wondering what the best way is to build the floor for the game. I need to be able to create both the visual aspect of the floor and the data for the physics engine.
Oh, did I mention I'm terrible at graphics editing?
I haven't used Box2D before (but I have used other 2D physics engines), so I can give you a general answer but not a Box2D-specific answer. You can easily just use a single static (stationary) Box if you want a flat plane as the floor. If you want a more complicated lunar surface (lots of craters, the sea of tranquility, whatever), you can construct it by creating a variety of different physics objects - boxes will almost always do the trick. You just want to make sure that all your boxes are static. If you do that, they won't move at all (which you don't want, of course) and they can overlap without and problems (to simulate a single surface).
Making an image to match your collision data is also easy. Effectively what you need to do is just draw a single image that more or less matches where you placed boxes. Leave any spots that don't have boxes transparent in your image. Then draw it at the bottom of the screen. No problem.
The method I ended up going with (you can see from my other questions) is to dynamically create the floor at runtime and then draw it to the screen.