Terrain
The terrain system lets you paint large, seamless ground surfaces using up to four blended texture layers and an optional water overlay.
Adding a Terrain
Add a Terrain_Component to any entity. The terrain is centered on the entity's position and spans a grid of chunks, each covering 32×32 world units.
Terrain Properties
Width / Height in Chunks
Size of the terrain grid. Each chunk is 32×32 world units, so a 4×4 terrain covers 128×128 units.
Detail Tiling
How many times each ground texture repeats across a single chunk. Higher values = more detail repetition.
Render Layer
Controls draw order relative to other sprites and terrain. Lower values draw behind.
Chunk Load Margin
Extra distance (in world units) beyond the camera view at which chunks are loaded.
Texture 0–3
The four ground texture layers. Each channel of the splat map (R, G, B, A) corresponds to one texture.
Editing Mode
Select the terrain entity and click the Edit button in the inspector to enter terrain editing mode. Click Cancel to exit.
While editing, you can paint directly in the scene view using the brush settings below.
Brush Settings
Brush Radius
Size of the circular brush in world units.
Brush Hardness
Controls falloff. At 1.0 the brush is a hard circle with no feathering. Lower values produce a soft gradient from center to edge.
Brush Strength
How strongly each stroke applies. Lower values allow gradual buildup.
Selected Channel
Which texture layer to paint (0–3 corresponding to Texture 0–3, or 4 for water).
Erase Mode
When enabled, painting removes the selected texture layer instead of applying it.
Painting Terrain Textures
Painting works by modifying a per-chunk 256×256 splat map. Each pixel stores four channel weights (RGBA) that blend between Texture 0–3.
Click and drag to paint along a line. The brush stamps at regular intervals along your stroke.
Soft blending gradually increases the target channel while proportionally reducing others, preserving smooth transitions.
Hard overwrite (at full hardness) sets the target channel to 100% and all others to 0%.
Erase reduces the selected channel, letting underlying textures show through.
Chunks are allocated lazily — empty chunks consume no memory until you first paint on them.
Water Layer
The terrain also supports a paintable water overlay with its own set of properties:
Water Body Texture
The main scrolling water texture.
Water Shore Texture
Texture applied at the edges of water areas.
Water Body Tiling
Repetition of the water texture.
Water Scroll Speed
How fast the water texture scrolls.
Water Shore Width
Width of the shore transition band.
Water Alpha
Opacity of the water overlay.
Water Render Layer
Draw order for the water layer (default: one above terrain).
Water is painted using the same brush controls but writes to a single-channel mask (0–255) rather than the four-channel splat map. Select channel 4 to paint water.
Box Fill
In addition to the circular brush, terrain and water can be filled using an axis-aligned box selection. Box fill always uses hard overwrite — useful for quickly covering large rectangular regions with a single texture or filling/clearing water areas.
Memory & Performance
The inspector shows a debug readout at the bottom of the terrain section:
Chunks: How many chunks have allocated splat/water data out of the total grid.
Memory: Estimated CPU and GPU memory usage.
Only chunks you've painted on consume memory. Splat data is LZ4-compressed for serialization, so file sizes stay small even for large terrains.
Tips
Start with a low brush strength (0.1–0.3) for natural-looking blends between texture layers.
Use a large, soft brush for broad base coverage, then switch to a smaller, harder brush for detail edges.
Water areas with a value of 0 are fully transparent — use erase or paint with strength 0 to remove water.
Keep chunk counts reasonable. A 16×16 terrain (512×512 world units) with full coverage uses roughly 4 MB of GPU memory for splat maps alone.
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