Roadmap for Unity Terrain improvements ?

[vagrant fable]

Since the new terrain tool has been canceled, it would be greatly appreciated to quickly know the roadmap for possible improvements to the current terrain tool in Unity.

• Non-destructive terrain: The ability to move mountains, roads, rivers, etc., similar to the "Atlas - Terrain Editor" asset on the Unity Asset Store.
• Shader Graph + Terrain Material: The ability to customize texture rendering, control water, snow, rain, etc.
• Flattening tool: A tool to flatten an area based on the 3D object above, such as a building.
• Terrain texture blending: The ability to blend terrain textures with a model.

I believe many of the features demonstrated in the new tool could be adapted to work with the current one.

[tacit horizon]

I just think it's more profitable for Unity to sit and profit on the cuts from people selling their own tools... unfortunately... thankfully I'm not invested anymore.

[keen shadow]

It still needs improvements in that case. The API doesn't expose enough to make substantial changes.

[indigo shard]

@keen shadow are there particular features of the api that you are finding lacking?

[keen shadow]

We had some discussion here:
https://discord.com/channels/489222168727519232/1352086343068684419

There's a number of things we can't touch, namely the mesh generation and the underlying data structures which can be very inefficient. In particular splatmaps can use a large amount of memory (I was up to a gigabyte for a mere 27 square kilometers of terrain).

In order to replace splatmaps with a more efficient solution we'd also need to be able to modify the code where those are painted - we don't have access to that. It's been a bit since I looked into this but at some point you hit some internal API and that's that.