Getting to know Gaia

I’ve probably spent way too long exploring Procedural Worlds' Gaia addon for Unity. Not entirely my fault.

Gaia is not the most robust when it comes to process handling. When setting up biomes and spawners, it does not provide any sort of button state management or feedback that heavier processes are being invoked. By ‘heavier’ I mean they require both disk and GPU time. However, there is nothing stopping me from clicking a button to start a spawn process a second time. There is nothing in Gaia's logic that checks if the process is already started before trying to start again.

This causes the system to start double reading and double writing the same resources, which inevitably causes instability, access errors and finally a crash. So, using Gaia has become an exercise in patients and trust that something has started when I start a spawn process. Another area Gaia is weak is in whatever the overcomplicated session manager is doing, instead of just adding assets to the scene and relying in Unity’s undo system. But, this has caused more duplicate assets being created because the session manager is constantly desyncing from the scene. This leads to disconnected terrain tiles which causes textures and details to stop updating when seeding the initial world.

But, when I work very slowly, pausing after any UI actions that start or update spawning processes for 10 -15 seconds. Then everything just trugs along without issue.

Ultimately, this is still saving days of work, not having to manually paint or place terrain over the ~3.2km² that the current prototype is. Not a huge map by any standards. Just big enough to have variety but still small enough I am not wasting time navigating around. As I seem to have no issue finding things to waste time on already!

–gs