Randomly generated terrain.

[MedianHansen]

UDK random terrain!!?
I have a problem.
I just started developing in UDK and i want a random generated terrain. NOT LIKE MINECRAFT, everyone seems to want blocky random generated terrain, i do not...
It seems you cannot change terrains during run-time, which essentially means, i cannot write ascript to assign random hills to it etc. Is there any way to achieve this? because it would really be nice.

I don't care if it's advanced, just as long as someone could throw me in the right direction. I have tried to seach these forums, and on google, but all i find are people attempting to do it like with minecraft.

Thanks in advance.

[JessieG]

I don't believe it's possible with UDK since the lighting would have to be dynamic for the entire terrain (since lightmass cannot be used at run-time either). I may be wrong, but if I am, I have a feeling the results wouldn't look too great or run very well.

[ambershee]

You are correct in that you cannot modify terrain at run time. If this is a feature you must have, I'd look elsewhere than UDK.

[MedianHansen]

Thanks a lot for the replies. And i Can say that udk is more important than random map generation.
Is there Any tricks to making it seem more random? Like ways to swap the texture, place random foliage etc?

[ambershee]

You could potentially randomise other things like object placement, but UDK is best built with static lighting.

[Spoondog]

Assuming you are using landscape, you could use some trickery to randomly offset the UVs of various landscape textures a little (offset the overall normal map, should be possible to offset layer weighting too and perhaps swap textures altogether, dirt -> snow etc). If you want to limit it to DirectX11 only you could maybe randomize WorldDisplacement in the landscape material too.

As for other objects you could have a bunch of objects where you have baked the lighting in yourself outside ued, with the lightmap texture applied in the material, the object as an interpactor set to not accept lights and DynamicLightEnvironment disabled, then with kismet you could randomly swap objects like that cheaply (careful with pathing, if you need it). And like ambershee says you can randomize some dynamic-lit objects but keep those to a minimum if you want performance.

So there are things you can do, if you are prepared to put up with some different workflow, know what you are doing, and are careful with how it's implemented. But it's certainly not easy and will require some time to experiment.

[MedianHansen]

Thanks a lot for the anwsers, however, seeing as this is my first project in udk, and that i'm no graphics artist, i don't think i'll have randomized levels. It wasn't a must for the project, just a nice feature. Thanks a lot for the input.