Caves

[Commander Jebidiah]

Just wondering how hard it would be to have caves in game t explore it or giant underground caverns for your mun bases.

Discuss

[Nemrav]

short answer : really hard with any height map/procedural terrain

long-ish answer:

While caves are interesting for games with large amounts of terrain, they are rarely added because they can't work with height map based terrain (unity terrain or other), height map basing being what allows for the large swaths of the terrain, it can all be done procedurally.

But height maps only include the visible height from a top down view, which means your caves become hills or mountains or ground craters.

There are the tylo caves in KSP, but having premade cave structures (how caves are usually done) require a lot of time to do nicely, and you would need a lot of them to have variation (its all done by hand)...

But as far as practical implementation goes, im pretty sure there was an asset store thing to cut holes in unity terrains... You could also use a pipe type cave system (with you go so far, the generator adds another caves section)...

[Tuareg]

short answer : really hard with any height map/procedural terrain

long-ish answer:

While caves are interesting for games with large amounts of terrain, they are rarely added because they can't work with height map based terrain (unity terrain or other), height map basing being what allows for the large swaths of the terrain, it can all be done procedurally.

But height maps only include the visible height from a top down view, which means your caves become hills or mountains or ground craters.

There are the tylo caves in KSP, but having premade cave structures (how caves are usually done) require a lot of time to do nicely, and you would need a lot of them to have variation (its all done by hand)...

But as far as practical implementation goes, im pretty sure there was an asset store thing to cut holes in unity terrains... You could also use a pipe type cave system (with you go so far, the generator adds another caves section)...

ksp planets are not unity terrains. they are proc generated planets (probably a bought asset from the store). with this kind of terrains you could even cut caves during play if they would implement it. but they wont...

[KerBlam]

you could even cut caves during play

What? Like destructible terrain? Man... That would be OSSUM!

[Tuareg]

http://u3d.as/content/amfu/terra-vol-voxel-terrain-engine/4ts