unity 3d terrain flatten heightmap height uneditable - unity3d

I made all my objects in blender, sketched out what classes I would need and had a good idea of most of the goals I wanted for my game. The plan was to create the terrain in unity, place all my blender objects on the terrain, add the unity fps controller then implement\attach the necessary scripts.
One problem. Step one creating the terrain. When I go to flatten heightmap I can't change the value in the height box. I try to set it to 40 but it always reverts back to one. Please help! If it matters I'm trying for an island. The idea being that if I raise the terrain I can reduce the height around the edges creating slopes and curves that will be covered in with water.

Got it working. Not exactly sure what fixed it but I think it had something to do with prefabs,

Related

Recommendations for clipping an entire scene in Unity

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.

2D Sprites in Isometric 3D Unity Project

The project works under a isometric orthographic camera, in a 3d space using 2d sprites.
What we are using are billboarding sprites into 3D colliders to archieve the 3d feeling.
The problem is that we don't really believe the way we are doing it it's the most optimal. We are also having problems introducing high areas, because we need to reply the sprite form in isometric perspective as colliders.
Because we are using 3D world, the tilemaps tools conflicts with the other vertical sprites.
We can not use a entire 2d floor billboarding sprite because that suposes to have a huge vertical sprite in front of the camera, so we can not display the others.
We are just researching for a solution before to change to a 2D world.
If you plan on sticking with isometric in 3D, get rid of the tilemaps entirely. They are just going to give you a headache and make your game lag itself to death. If you want to convert to entirely 2D isometric, you can stick with them as they would work fine. Now, a few comparisons between the 2D and 3D approaches, and how best to approach them. This is a jumbled list of drawbacks/advantages to each type, so it's more of a ramble after this point than an answer, but I couldn't be more specific without knowing more about your project's overall requirements and specifications.
Unity recently added Isometric Tilemapping as a dedicated feature. So, if you choose to fake it with 2D, your life will be a lot easier.
Controls are a lot easier in 3D, as the physics won't ever have to be
faked.
3D allows foreground objects to automatically cover up background
objects without having to add an arbitrary system to achieve the same
effect.
2D is fundamentally faster than 3D, and if you're aiming for mobile,
that's going to be very important to your project's success.
3D allows you to rotate your camera if you design it right. (Check out Don't Starve Together for an example of this design).

How can I use baked lighting on sprites? / How to light up a large area in 2D?

I'm having trouble figuring out how to light up large area(s) of sprites in Unity 2D. My previous knowledge on Unity's lighting is zero.
I first tried using a large amount of point lights and using the "Sprites/Diffuse" material, but about only five would actually render at a time, so I guess there's a limit on that.
Then I tried putting in an area light. That didn't do anything, so that's when I started doing research about baked lighting on sprites (and baked lighting in general). I found stuff like this but I couldn't get it to work either because it's outdated or because I don't know what I'm doing. Other answers I've come across seem to assume that the reader knows anything about lighting in Unity in the first place which, to be honest, I don't. Unity's documentation website had some information on it, but no tutorials that go into how to set up baked lighting.
I've tried a bunch of different combinations of materials (like using the "Standard" shader for the sprites instead of "Sprites/Diffuse", emission, ect.) and I enabled "Baked Global Illumination" in Lighting>Settings.
If baked lighting isn't possible on sprites (or isn't worth the trouble), what are the alternatives?
Edit: I made sure not to have the lights pointing the wrong direction, and I do realise that Unity2D is just like painting onto a piece of paper in Unity3D. I was able to get point lights to work, but only a few at a time. I don't need to do the entire screen at once, I need to do a large specific area at once.
some tips...
working with sprites your in 2d... when you add a light, switch to 3d mode, and rotate to make sure your light is pointed at your objects, and oriented so as not to be on the same plane, or level with them, as this will cast all the light behind them.
if your trying to light up everything on the screen(in camera) attach an area light to the camera at the cameras position, point it where the camera points, and then in the inspector on the right, you can change its variables. intensity, range, width, height etc.
Emissive Texture:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oa6kW5HhRd4
For some reason, I never even thought about going into the asset store. I found this for free, and it looks like it will work: Light2D.

Make pixel lighting like terraria and starbound

I'm making a 2D sandbox game like "Terraria" and "Starbound". This is my game
The light is filling the whole terrain but i don't want it. I want following:
You're probably using Directional Lighting, which illuminates the whole terrain equally in the direction you made it.
You could use Spot Lights or Point Lights, which will illuminate only the surface you want to.
Edit: although using this method, this could take way more resources due to the number of single lights placed throughout the map.

Breaking up a sprite in cocos2d

I'm making a 2D plane fighting game for the iPhone in cocos2d. I'm trying to make it so when you shoot an enemy plane, it breaks into a couple of separated pieces that will fall out of sight. What is generally the best practice for breaking one sprite up into many? should I create new images for each separate piece, or treat the initial image like a sprite sheet, and make a new sprite from segments?
Please look at this tutorial
It makes a grid of points then moves the internal (not-edge) ones around randomly a bit so it's not all perfect triangles. Then each update it moves/rotates the triangles separately--then draws them all at once.
You treat the whole thing as a sprite, so can run any of the usual actions on it. This example uses CCMoveBy to move the whole group down off the bottom.