Godot Plug-In, Terrain3D, Reaches Version 1.0

Terrain3D, a popular plug-in for the Godot game engine, has now been released as version 1.0. It’s available for free, and primarily comes from Outobugi Games and Tokisan Games. Both developers have created a variety of other dev tools, and the latter is also behind medieval adventure game Out of the Ashes.

Terrain3D was first released in July 2023 and immediately drew attention for a few reasons: it uses Geometric Clipmap Mesh Terrain (the same tech used in The Witcher 3), it arrived with a lot of useful features already implemented, and it’s arguably the most popular terrain plug-in that was made specifically to become an official part of Godot.

“Terrain3D 1.0 has been released! Fully supporting GodotEngine 4.4. We’ve reached ‘production ready’ after 10 public releases over 1.5 years, with the help of over 30 contributors,” said Cory Petkovsek, one of the main devs, on his official X (Twitter) account. 

“Finally, Terrain3D has become the best terrain system for Godot through the efforts of many contributors.”

Open Source World

Terain3D is open source, and as such has had contributions from an average of 25 developers. Petkovsek highlighted a few core ideas, on X, that should be music to the ears of game devs.

“Ambient Occlusion is now generated from height textures. AO, roughness, and normal strengths are exposed allowing adjusting them without changing the texture files,” he said.

“Dynamic collision, which generates collision only around the player. This saves many GBs of memory, starts up faster than before, and allows for runtime terrain modification.”

In short, games made using Terrain3D can not only look nicer, but run better too. For casual game devs or gamers thinking of getting started on their own title, Terrain3D still allows users to paint terrain manually. This means it’s relatively easy to create handcrafted maps with automatic textures, and they can do so while the game is actually running to make any tweaks on-the-fly.

There’s Still Work to be Done

Professional game developers and gamers just getting started on their dev journey can download Terrain3D through Godot’s Asset Library. Petkovsek does highlight a few kinks that still need working out, though.

“Terrain3D Web Exports work on most web platforms. We’ve done all we can to make it work. There are a few browsers or platforms that don’t work, like iOS. That’s up to the hardware/OS/drivers/Godot to sort out.”