Unity - How to get started working on a large terrain/map?

Question

I want to begin working on a big sandbox game with lots of oceans and islands. This will obviously require a very big map.

I've spent the last couple days researching the best methods on doing this and so far have figured out that

1. I need to split the terrain into tiles/chunks.

2. I need to have the player only load those tiles/chunks that are closest to them and unload those further away.

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That being said. I would rather avoid flooding my game with a bunch of assets and want to kind of handle things on my own and hard code these systems in myself.

Some questions,

Can I just create a massive 20k x 20k terrain using Unity's built in terrain editing system and then worry about splicing and loading/unloading the tiles later?

or do I need to build my big terrain in an alternative program and import my terrain in then handle the splicing and loading situation?

Also, when it comes to multiplayer. I assume I would just need to basically do the same thing just for each client?

I would appreciate any other tips or guidance on doing this as well. Thanks.

Answer 1

Splitting into multiple chunks but ones that arent too small seems to be the better option, maybe like 4 quarters, that way you are not flooding with assets, you would disable all quarters except the one the player is in.

The problem with making a big terrain is, while you could get a tool from the asset store to split ur terrain later, you will get into the headache of resolutions and sizes and overall I guess its better to split it into 4 pieces or a bit.

You would have a trigger point where you want the game to load the terrain, and depending on which trigger point the player entered you would load the corresponding terrain piece.

For multiplayer, you would do the same thing for each client, making your big terrain as 4 smaller terrains and then loading the corresponding quarter. Tell me if I missed something.