Calculating assembled project size

[david.norlin]

Are there any good ways to calculate the built project size with regards to terrain?  I am curious what Unigine does with the source data when building terrain with the landscape tool.  Does it store it more efficiently, creating a smaller build?  Given that we have a very large terrain area, I am trying to calculate size requirements ahead of time so I know how detailed I can go with our data sources.  

For example: 

Terrain area is 600x800km. 

Albedo is an 8k tile for every 2x2km
Heightmap is (currently) an 8k tile for every 2x2 km (I will probably reduce this significantly).  
I will need detail several masks at 2k for every 2x2 km.  I plan on using these as vegetation masks as well to save disk space. 

Mostly, I am concerned with using too many high detail data sources and creating a project that is enormous and cannot be downloaded reasonably by any customer, so efficiency is highly important.  Also, a requirement of the project is that detail must be relatively consistent everywhere within the play area, so I am attempting to balance these needs. 

Any advice on this topic would be very helpful!  Thank you. 

[morbid]

David, if I understood you correctly the question is on terrain size mainly.

Landscape Tool provides you with an estimated disk size that will be consumed by terrain data, see the screenshot below. From your description terrain will be decent and quite big. I suggest you using landscape tool prognosis as a reference. Usually final data 10-15% lesser than it was predicted.

In general assemble project makes your build smaller by stripping off assets. It also creates an UNG archive. But this wouldn't help with terrain data.

Thank you.

[david.norlin]

Thank you Morbid.  

I have experimented with compressing my albedo jpgs and the lowest I can go while maintaining quality is about 3-4mb per tile.  Extended across a large land area, this is still in the area of 400-500GB...just for imagery.  

Is Unigine able to do any decompression of terrain imagery during runtime?  Is there a way to compress it on disk and then decompress as the player approaches that section of the terrain?  If not natively supported, is it something we could add?

Thanks.

 

[morbid]

You can compress all vegetation mask stored in <terrain_folder>/landcover into LZ4 format after you've done all work with them. This will save some space. All other terrain data is already compressed (I mean *.uts files).

You have the following options to reduce final data size:

• Change sources to less detailed. Decreasing source resolution by 2 you'll get 4x fewer terrain data. 
• If you don't want to reprocess your source files you can use manual LODs configuration in Landscape Tool. The idea is the same - get rid of LOD with an excessive resolution
• You can make terrain smaller, but I guess it's not an option

Anyway, your terrain is really big. AAA games with open world have much smaller locations and quite a big hunger for disk space.

By the way, you're looking for the "output path value", not the cache? Cache is used only for generation process.

Thank you.

 

[werner.poetzelberger]

@david.norlin which kind of application you are producing?

[david.norlin]

@morbid This is good information.  I will experiment with 4k albedos instead.  This would help significantly.   Also, it is good to hear we can use LZ4 compression for vegetation masks, as this will also save us many GB of space. Thanks for the advice!  

@werner.poetzelberger I will send you a PM.