godot_heightmap_plugin VS tps-demo

Zylann's repo has a v4-compatible branch that was last updated 4 days ago, and there seems to be another one working on this, and another one published a few months ago, plus there are lots of videos out there about doing it in other tools and then just importing the heightmaps / splatmaps in Godot (e.g. from devmar's YT channel).

godot_heightmap_plugin

Back in 3.0 I was using this plugin for heightmap terrain: https://github.com/Zylann/godot_heightmap_plugin

source: https://github.com/Zylann/godot_heightmap_plugin/issues/279

You can create terrain and paint it with the zylann.hterrain plugin. Currently only supports Godot 3.x.

Sweet, how's the tooling to actually make a playable textured level from a heightmap though? In 3.0 I had to rely on Zylann's excellent plugin which was all well and good but I needed to compile it for each platform I wanted to ship on, and editor integration was good but not perfect. Also procedural generation of terrain in-game wasn't practical.

As we know, there's a lack of a node similar to Unreal's Landscape and Unity's Terrain. I believe this hurts Godot more than generally assumed. There is of course Zylann's plugin for 3.x, but I believe an officially supported node for this would be incredibly beneficial. Zylann's plugin will most likely get updated for 4.x eventually, but I personally know people who were shocked to find out that this functionality was not in Godot 4 when it had so many improvements for 3D - and it ended up being the deal breaker that pushed them away.

The one I know is Zylann.hterrain which is gdscript but also not updated for 4.x

Project from open source demo available here: https://github.com/godotengine/tps-demo

The TPS demo uses AnimationTree root motion and is updated in _physics_process(). It should work in theory, as lawnjelly tested it numerous times while working on the physics interpolation PR. Maybe he had to modify parts of the demo and didn't open a pull request for it yet, though.

And yes, shaders are not cached, so that's responsible for some lag spikes. Calinou made a more optimized demo version, maybe you want to check it out: https://github.com/godotengine/tps-demo/pull/111

The TPS demo runs slowly because it uses GIProbe in high quality mode by default. If you use lightmaps instead, you'll find it runs much faster: https://github.com/godotengine/tps-demo/pull/111

Some additional information: The images on the right run with about double the framerate. The images on the right are using new techniques available in Godot 3.4, while the images on the left can be done in Godot 3.4, 3.3, and 3.2. For even more information, see this pull request: https://github.com/godotengine/tps-demo/pull/111

You're not supposed to commit the .import/ directory. It's for storing hashes of the assets the engine already processed on your machine. See example an of a gitignore file here.