World Creator 2 - A Procedural Terrain and Landscape Generator

[codex]

Hello everybody,

thought it might be of interest to tell you about our new upcoming release of World Creator 2 (www.world-creator.com).

[attach=1] [attach=2] [attach=3]

It has been completely redeveloped from scratch and introduces state-of-the-art features such as:

- Realtime Terrain Generation (move sliders, change settings and see in realtime how they affect the terrain) which works even for 8192 by 8129 pixels heightmaps
- Fully GPU powered (the faster and better your graphics card, the faster the entire generation process)
- Landscape Generation (populate your terrain with objects such as trees, grass, stones, towns, and whatever you can think of)
- Realtime Erosion and Sedimentation Filters
- Realtime Graphics as known in AAA Games
- Tons of Assets such as PBR Textures, Trees from SpeedTree, Stones, Grass, Flowers and so much more - it will be a huge package
- Realtime Masking for Terrain Surface, Textures, Objects, Roads, Rivers and and and ...
- UNLIMITED Heightmap resolution support (no more restrictions - create heightmaps as large as you want - the only limit is your SSD / HDD)
- Export capablities (OBJ, RAW 8, RAW 16, RAW 32, PNG, JPG, FBX, BMP, GeoTIFF, TIF) - export heightmaps, masks (terrain, textures, objects, roads, rivers, seas), heatmaps, splatmaps, colormaps, XML files for your objects
- Import capabilities (OBJ, RAW 8, RAW 16, RAW 32, PNG, JPG, FBX, BMP, GeoTIFF, TIF) - import heightmaps, masks (terrain, textures, objects, roads, rivers, seas), heatmaps, splatmaps, colormaps, XML files for your objects
- Roads and Rivers Tools
- Tons of Powerful Terrain Filters (Erosion, Mountain, Ridged, Hills, Terrace, Canyon, Alien, Rocky, Desert, Minecraft, ...) you can combine to create other different terrain types
- Full support of creating biomes
- Import and apply existing terrains / heightmaps and combine them to create something new or to enhance / transform them into something better
- Realtime AAA water and rivers
- Virtual Reality Support (Oculus, Vive, ...)
- You will also be able to create your own Terrain filters
- Integrated Asset Store where you can sell / purchase assets

There is so much more  . Terrains created with World Creator can be imported into Terragen to create photoreal art with the powerful rendering capabilities of Terragen.

If you would like to see how the Unity version of World Creator already acts visit our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClabqa6PHVjXzR2Y7s1MP0Q

Pre-Orders are available and include ALPHA / BETA acces starting September 2016. Additionally you get World Creator 1 for FREE.

We are looking forward to hearing from you. Suggestions and Ideas are very welcome  .

When we first developed the Unity plugin of World Creator, the community gave us so many great ideas we have implemented - actually, YOU make World Creator to what it is intended to be: one of the most powerful terrain generators. 

Kind regards,
Stefan Kraus

[reck]

Sounds very interesting, will certainly check it out.

I don't often check the Open Discussion board so completely missed this. Maybe it could be posted in the general board so it would be seen by more people, unless it goes against the rules?

[codex]

Oh I did not know so thank you for the hint. I guess this is only possible by a moderator ...

Thank you and kind regards,
Stefan

[paq]

Hello,

Is the first alpha/beta actually available for the standalone version ?
What about a demo video (again form the standalone, not the unity version) ?

Pre-ordeing a game why not ... , but giving 300$ for software without any kind of demo is a bit hard to justify.
And depending how stable the alpha would be, it might be unusable for the next 6-12 months.

Sorry if it sounds harsh, I'm trying to fight an impulse buying 

[codex]

When pre-ordering version 2 of World Creator you get World Creator 1 for free which is also known as GeoControl, a very powerful terrain generator but with the lack of speed

Our plan is to release a stable version in November. We can do that because most of the code is already done and needs just to be ported. The critical part was the rendering and visualization of ultra large terrains in realtime which we will solve this week and release the very first ALPHA this week. Once this part is finished, updates can be expected every week or sometime almost every day. So it is not about waiting 12 month until you can use it.

The other good thing about pre-ordering is that you get instant access to World Creator 1 and World Creator 2 and therefore you can participate in the development with your ideas and suggestions. Actually this is how the Unity version wa developed. So said, we truly appreciate any idea and suggestion to make it a great product and we are the kind of developers that implement those ideas as long as they make sense of course.

Another point is - but only a more cosmetic point - that customers that pre-ordered World Creator get an extra skin, identifiying them as supporters of World Creator.

A demo is not planned for World Creator 2 yet but you get World Creator 1 for free - so actually you can start creating stunning terrains right after your pre-order.

Hope that helps

[mhaze]

Do owners of World creator one get an upgrade discount?

[codex]

Yes - 30%. Please contact support@bitethebytes.com and send your invoice of World Creator 1 or your license key file that you have received after your purchase.

The 30% also applies to all GeoControl customers. Write us a mail and send us your license key or invoice to get the 30% discount code.

[ajcgi]

- Tons of Assets such as PBR Textures, Trees from SpeedTree, Stones, Grass, Flowers and so much more - it will be a huge package

Do you mean many assets are included in the purchase?
This looks like a great turnkey solution for many scenes.

How do we get to alpha test?

[codex]

Yes, there will be really a few hundred of textures (specs, albedo, normal, disp, ao ...), 3d models, trees from speedtree and such things.

The alpha can be pre-ordered on our website: www.world-creator.com

We are going to release the very first ALPHA this week - do not expect too much with that first release but weekly updates will fill it more and more with content and functionality. By participating in the pre-order you get instant access to World Creator 1 plus version 2 and you can participate in development with ideas and suggestion.

[paq]

Hi Stefan,

Thanks for the infos !

- Will the standalone version requires a constant internet connection ?
- Is the license locked to a user, or to a specific computer ?

I'm really impressed by the generation speed in Unity.

It's probably not the best place to talk about this, but do you have any plan/idea to break the simple  'elevation' aspect of world creator ?
I know we can use tri-planar projection, but I'm wondering if something could be done to the mesh itself ... like some sort of adaptive subdivision
to uniform triangle size in high slope area ?

[codex]

Hi,

the uniform triangle size is quite difficult and depends on the terrain system you use. In our case it is not supported for the mesh which is actually not such a big problem because we use tesselation which can be optimized for such reasons. So with tesselation, such things can be done very efficient on the GPU. In combintaion with tri-planar tetxure mapping and displacement maps it creates stunning results.

The standalone version is not going to require a constant internet connection. You will require it once to activate / deactivate your license such as in Unity. That license will be locked to the user or to a company at a specific location.

The generation speed will be even faster in the standalone version as we are not restricted to the Unity editor - all in all the entire process is extremely fast already. In our current prototype we are flying over a 64k by 64k terrain in realtime streaming the data from a standard HDD (not SSD) without any problems. The terrain system and streaming is highly optimized already with a very low memory usage.

Kind regards,
Stefan

[mhaze]

Could you tell us more about the outputs,  I'd much prefer a .ter or heightfield (.tiff or .tga) output to a mesh one for use in Terragen.

[Rumburak]

I already asked in the World Creator forums for a *.ter output option. Stefan put that on his ToDo list and I assume it will be available. But maybe not in the initial beta version.

World Creator 1 is able to export to *.ter.

[codex]

Yep, it is on our list

[DannyG]

Looks good Stefan ! Congratulations