Thanks for your review. Contrary to your review, Gaia is not a festival of bugs. You experienced a specific issue that produced a Unity warning, which we were unable to replicate. As far as we can tell, this appears to be a Unity bug, and it did not prevent you from using the product. We even suggested that you report it to Unity. Regarding support, two of our team members made a genuine effort to assist you.

Thanks for your review. All new development is now done on Gaia Pro VS.

Thanks for your review. Gaia has about 5gb of assets which is part of what you pay for. It takes time for Unity to import them. Same goes for any other large asset. And am curious as to how you think it has less features. Every release gets more features, and support for a range of Unity versions.

Thanks for your review. There are a number of reasons why an asset can throw compilation errors, from namespace conflicts with other poorly written assets to weird pipeline-specific conflicts. We are happily using Gaia Pro 2021 on massive metaverse projects, with zero issues, and zero compilation errors. If you would like support to get value from the asset you have purchased, please contact us at support@procedural-worlds.com.

Thanks for your review. We find Gaia itself highly stable, but we were not happy with some of the add-on code for controllers, lighting, sound, etc. This code is not core and is also fragile when not done precisely as expected. We refactored this substantially in Gaia Pro 2023 to be simpler, more modular and more explicit. Overall, the next major release of Gaia is a far more robust system.

Thanks for your review! That's exactly right. Gaia does 85% of the work for you, and allows you to add the magic that makes the magic! I call it artist driven procedural generation, and IMHO its the most productive way to get a lot of work done fast!

Thanks for your review! Glad you are enjoying Gaia!

Thanks for the positive review and for sharing your experience with customer support!

Thanks for the review and for listing the pros and cons of Gaia as you see them! In Gaia Pro 2023, you will find that many of the issues with the runtime system have been addressed. We have simplified and removed a lot of the old code that had hidden dependencies. Regarding the notes about support and community: A reaction time of 24 hours or less from a staff member is stellar for customer support, where the support is included in the purchase price of a cheap asset. Many software companies, including Unity charge a substantial recurring fee per seat for this level of service. For community interaction, we also offer a Discord here: https://discord.gg/TggjQNN. While users post both on Discord and Canopy, the community is more active on Discord.

Thanks for the positive review and your account of the stability of the application! :)

Thanks for the positive review, you summed up Gaia well with what you wrote!

Thanks for the positive review and for the feedback! Regarding your points: 1. ) Please note that the "D3D11 swap chain error" issue is more a general Direct3D / Unity issue that may be triggered by Gaia, but we do not have immediate control over it. In a nutshell, it can happen in unity that processing on the GPU can trigger a timeout detection, the system thinks your GPU is hanging / stalled which then leads to that error appearing in Unity. You can find some more information about & a potential fix for this issue in the Setup tab of the Gaia Manager. If you do a google search on this issue, you will also find a lot of threads on the unity forum with users experiencing this issue in all kinds of constellations without using Gaia at all. 2.) Please excuse the support lag, it took us some time to try to re-create your constellation in an attempt to reproduce the problem. We were not able to reproduce your issue, but gave some pointers in the support thread on Canopy about how you can further investigate this problem.

Thanks for the positive review!

Thanks for the positive review! Please note regarding the support issue: The discord server is mainly run by the community, and we occasionally answer quick questions there. To receive proper support from the Procedural Worlds staff, please post your issue on the canopy forum: https://canopy.procedural-worlds.com/ On there we can have a thread dedicated to your issue that is not lost in the discord chatter, and will be archived there for future users who then have a chance to see the replies to your issue as well.

Thanks for the positive review & Thanks for outlining the advantage of owning the complete bundle and taking the time to learn the tools within!

Thanks for your review :) Glad you are enjoying our tools!

Thanks for the review! Sorry to hear that you are not happy with our customer support. We reviewed your messages to see why they were replied to poorly / not replied to, but we did not find anything that would fit the description. Could you please tell us how you contacted us? Please note that the official platform to receive support is the forum on Canopy https://canopy.procedural-worlds.com/forums/. If you posted there already, can you please link the threads so we can review & answer them?

Thanks for your review. We genuinely appreciate your feedback as an Architect and Canopy user. We are reviewing our onboarding and support processes at the moment and considering what needs to change for Gaia Pro 2023. We cannot message you via Unity, but we would love to talk to you to get your feedback and suggestions directly. Please message us at https://www.procedural-worlds.com/about/contact-us/, and we will contact you.

Thanks for your review. Quite a bit to unpack there, as you have certainly gone to town. 1. Gaia has been actively supported since you bought it two years ago. It's been actively supported since it was first released in 2015. I see this as a positive. 2. I get crashes on my machine with Unity whether I use Gaia or not. Unity is full of bugs that cause it to crash - just read their release notes. Gaia pushes Unity hard, but I do not believe it causes crashes, or I would always see them. I don't. 3. Gaia Player does work properly - if you set it up correctly. You did ask about this on Canopy, and we responded within 2 HOURS. I would describe this as excellent support, which is the opposite of the lousy support you claim in your review. 4. Discord is TERRIBLE for detailed technical support! Many of our support questions are nothing to do with our products. If we answer them on Discord, then the answer is gone as soon as the screen scrolls up, and we have had many, many instances of people asking the same question 2 lines after the previous same question was answered. This does not work for us or our customers. The reason Canopy exists is because the content is openly accessible to anyone, it can contain threads that are several pages long as we track into issues, and so that it can be searched. I would rather search a forum and get instant answers to my problem than wait for a support person. It's also a great way to learn from other people. 5. We have a library full of written and video content on Canopy and a forum full of answers to the myriad of different ways people use our products. Writing yet another form of document is just overkill that would then have to be maintained. We are always looking to improve, however, and will be exploring the concept of training AI based bots to answer questions in the relatively near future.

Thank you so much for taking the time to write this review! We're glad to hear that our product meets your expectations and that you appreciate the ability to import real heightmaps. We completely agree that developing scenes with tools like ours is a wonderful way to express creativity, and we appreciate your patience and dedication to learning the techniques necessary to use it fully.

Thanks for your review! Gaia is a deep and powerful tool, and it's hard to write down every feature as we keep adding them.

Thanks for the positive review! The control areas that you mention could be achieved in two ways: 1. When you move a spawner or a biome to a certain area, it is possible to spawn in a local area only. On the spawner, this is done with the "Spawn Local" button, on the biome controller there is a Area dropdown on the list of spawners where you can switch between "World" and "Local". When doing a local spawn, only the area within the range of the tool will be processed. 2. It is possible to set up a mask in world space so that a biome / a spawner will only work in certain parts of the world. Please see the info about "Local vs World space" in the documentation about masks: https://canopy.procedural-worlds.com/library/tools/gaia-pro-2021/written-articles/populating_your_world/3-introduction-to-masks-r50/ When you then spawn across the entire world, the spawn should be much faster because areas that are outside of the mask will be processed faster during spawning.

Thanks for the positive review and the suggestions!

Thanks for the positive review!

Thanks for your review. Gaia is very stable for us, and therefore should be very stable for you, especially on an LTS version of Unity. The fact that you are getting crashes seems to indicate something is weird in your setup workflow or on your PC itself. This could be as obscure as just making sure your graphics drivers are up to date, as Gaia does a lot of its generation on the GPU. Please lodge a support request on Canopy, and we will see if we can help you. WRT your comment on tutorials, this is a catch-22 situation for us. We get a lot of users that love the slower pacing, as they are new to Unity, and then we also have more advanced users. Then, because Gaia is a very powerful tool and can be used in many ways, people ask us for videos of all the potential edge cases - which of course, is not feasible for us to do. You can see an overview of both the written and the video tutorials here: https://canopy.procedural-worlds.com/library/tools/gaia-pro-2021/ EDIT: Thanks for updating your review after you got better results out of it! These stability issues are unfortunately very difficult for us to catch, as every system configuration is different.

Thanks for the review. Please note that you can add more stamps after the world designer. Please open the Gaia Manager, go to the "Advanced" tab and under "Gaia Tools" there is a button to add an additional Stamper to the scene. This stamper then can be used on the Terrain(s) you initially generated from the World Designer to edit them further and add additional features like another mountain etc. It is correct that Gaia is a design-time tool - it uses features of the unity editor that are not available in a standalone build. If you are stuck with any other issues please post them in the forum on our community site Canopy where we can assist you better. https://canopy.procedural-worlds.com/ EDIT: Thanks for updating the review! If you have any more issues or feedback, please feel free to create a post on Canopy so we can take a look.

Thanks for the positive review!

Thanks for the positive review! Please report the crashes / stability issues on our support platform Canopy: https://canopy.procedural-worlds.com/. We are currently not aware of general stability issues like you described here. If you can attach the unity editor logfile from after the crash to your post, we have a chance to look into and potentially resolve this issue for you & future users as well.

Thanks for your feedback. We take bugs and quality issues seriously, and anything you put on our forums will be read and responded to. The benefit of our Canopy forums, compared to Discord, is that you get a steadily growing body of content that can easily be searched (often allowing you to resolve your issue without us), and it also means that questions do not get lost. By comparison, as soon as something asked in discord scrolls off the screen, it is gone, and there is none of the power of a forum-based search. I think how quickly your questions get answered is down to the time of the week and our workload. We have a dedicated support person, and they take weekends off like everyone else. There have been a bunch of sales recently, and it can take a little longer when we are under load. We would be happy to offer priority support if the community wants it, but my sense is that most people would not be prepared to pay. I am totally open to hiring more if we can make the books balance. You are welcome to DM me (Adam) on our discord with your issues and I will be happy to follow up with the team.

Thanks for your review. Gaia Pro 2021 comes with many sample assets, which take time to import. I find the slow Unity import process tedious as well, but it is a one-off process, and once it is done, you then have the benefit of having lots of sample assets to use in your project. Most people are happy to wait a few extra minutes because of this. Go grab a coffee! Unfortunately, Unity crashes happen often, and I get them regularly in projects that don't have Gaia as well. A quick search on the Unity release notes will give you a sense of just how many crashing issues Unity have. Your best bet is to use the 2021 LTS versions of Unity if you want a more stable experience. Anything that is not an LTS version is considered a 'technical preview' by Unity. If you would like support, please contact us on Canopy.

Thanks for the review, we would like to address the points you brought up: 1) It is correct that Gaia does NOT do runtime generation. We also do not advertise it as doing runtime generation. It makes heavy use of features and functionalities of the Unity Editor which are not present in a standalone build. 2) It is NOT correct that Gaia only supports equal width and height maps. The World Generator (which is only one way of creating a heightmap) only supports the generation of square worlds for technical reasons, but you can easily strip off the unwanted terrains after the initial heightmap generation process, and continue working with Gaia afterwards on your non-square worlds. If you chose the stamper approach to generate your heightmaps, you can also start working on a non-square world directly. 3) It is difficult to comment on the crashes without having the full background. We use Gaia in most of our projects for external customers without any stability issues. Please reach out to support again as we would refund your purchase if we can not resolve your issues.

Thanks for the review. We respectfully disagree - the recent tutorial series on how to create a biome with Gaia covers the core usage of the product and goes into fully customizing your settings - the tutorial video series can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_F6YJ-pbdsY The sample biomes are pre-made configurations for environments that you can spawn in with a click, we do not see that as a negative? You can still fully customize them to your needs or start from scratch if need be. The maps you can make with Gaia are mostly limited by your imagination or by the capabilities of the Unity Engine. If you run into any problems you are not left to fend for yourself, but you can contact us in our support forums at https://canopy.procedural-worlds.com/ where we will help you with your issues.

Thanks for the positive review!

Thank you for your kind words! Your review was the first thing I read today as I sat down to start work, and it made my day. Good luck with your project!

Thanks for the positive review! The aspect of "how much time would me save this" is often overlooked when evaluating the price of the software, so it is nice to see this reflected in a review!

Thanks for your review. Gaia gives you full control over the process of world generation, or it can do it for you, as you prefer. We have gone to considerable effort to make it as intuitive as possible, even adding real time previews in the stamper before shaping the terrain. You can learn how to do this via the tutorials and articles in the library section on Canopy. You are also welcome to share your experience there so that we can explore and perhaps improve either your work flow, or the product itself based on your feedback. Your comment about our lack of support for indies is inaccurate. You can get our assets either here or via subscription on Canopy, and the choice is 100% yours. The reality is that a subscription of $39 per month is far cheaper than the asset store, as it gives you access to all of our assets for a fraction of their purchase price here. Regardless of which choice you make, support is 100% free via Canopy.

Thanks for the positive review!

Hi, thanks for the review! Sorry that you had such a hard time reaching out to us - the correct way would be via canopy, the only reason to be blocked there would be if the system identifies you as a bot via a hidden reCaptcha - if you have anything enabled / disabled in your browser that might prevent reCaptcha, this might cause the issue. Can you please send me an email directly at peter "at" procedural-worlds "dot" com so I can help you get your account set up in canopy for future support requests? Regarding your request: If you look at the position of the "PW_VFX_Rain" Mesh during runtime (try enabling wireframe view in scene view so that you can see the mesh) you can see that the mesh always moves with the camera position, so the camera should always be in the center of the "tubes" of the mesh, looking outward. We should be able to provide you with a double sided version of the mesh, but I think it might not help much: I think this has more to do with how the shader for the rain vfx was written, it increases the visibility of the rain effect when you look against the sunlight. In any case please try to send me a direct email and I can help you get setup in Canopy and see what we can do to resolve this issue for you.

Thanks for the positive review! Glad you encourage other users to look into learning the tool, while you can great results with the defaults you will get even better ones when learning the tool and customizing the spawners etc. for the needs of your current project.

Thanks for the positive review!

Thanks for your review. We go to a lot of effort to provide access to a searchable forum full of information, and we have a dedicated full-time support person, which is rare across the entire publisher ecosystem. There is a change however that your support request has fallen through the cracks. Please ensure that you post your support request in the Gaia forum on Canopy: https://canopy.procedural-worlds.com/ EDIT: Thanks for adapting the review after contacting us via Canopy! The modularity os something we want to improve in further iterations of Gaia, in general we plan it to make it so that things like lighting, water etc. are things that can be activated independently of the core terrain editor.

Thanks for the positive review! We are happy to hear that you also think Gaia allows smaller teams or individuals to compete with the results of larger studios - that is part of why we made it.

Thanks for the positive review! Happy to hear you could bring Gaia to good use for fast terrain creation in your scenes.

Thanks for the positive review!

Hi, thanks for the positive review! Could you please post which tutorial video you mean? To my knowledge the subtitle translations should be generated automatically after the upload. As far as I know we do not adjust anything in youtube that would prevent the auto translate, but if you can tell us the video here (or on canopy https://canopy.procedural-worlds.com/ ideally) then we can double check to see if there is something we can do.

您好，感谢您的积极评价，感谢您支持我们的决定！ 我们非常依赖资产商店的收入，您的支持有助于支付我们的员工。 （自动翻译）

Thanks for the review! Buying from the asset store and the subscription on the Canopy page are two different models to get Gaia: When purchasing from the asset store you have a one-time payment that includes product updates and support within the current product lifecycle (see "Update policy" in the asset store description). When subscribing on canopy you have a (smaller) monthly payment for that you get access to the newest versions of multiple procedural worlds tools and bonus content, but you will only get updates and support while the subscription is active. Users can pick between the two models and choose the one that is more appealing to them.

Thanks for the positive review!

Hi, thanks for the review! The water system in Gaia is currently intended as a global "ocean water", if you want to create additional bodies of water it is possible, but it requires manual setup in the scene and you would need to extend the detection for when the camera is underwater to display underwater FX. You can read more about it here in this comment on Canopy: https://canopy.procedural-worlds.com/forums/topic/252-weird-pixelated-textures-on-terrain/?do=findComment&comment=1148&_rid=13 We plan to improve this in the future so that it becomes easier to set up multiple independent bodies of water.

Hi thanks for the kind review! It is nice to see you to so excited about Gaia. Please feel free to post your flight videos on our community site Canopy as well: https://canopy.procedural-worlds.com/

Thanks for your review :) Glad you are enjoying Gaia! We have some awesome free stamp packs over at Canopy to help you get even more use out of Gaia https://canopy.procedural-worlds.com/files/category/16-gaia-bonuses/.

Hi, thanks for the review! Please make a backup before trying, but normally your terrain file will not be destroyed when you delete the Gaia folder - all relevant data for your scenes you created is stored in the "Gaia User Data" folder. This allows you to delete the Gaia installation folder, and the scene / terrain data will be kept intact. Please try not to use the review system for support requests. You can sign up over at our new community & support site "Canopy": https://canopy.procedural-worlds.com/

Hi, thanks for the positive review! There is an update price for updating from the non-2021 to the 2021 versions - however it sounds you bought the non 2021 version in error. If that is the case, please contact our support at https://proceduralworlds.freshdesk.com/support/tickets/new with your invoice number, and we should be able to get you sorted.

Hi, thanks for the review! Regarding the issues with "updating the terrain" please let us know on our discord or via the support system if there is anything where we can assist you with. We would also be interested in hearing where your pain points were when working with Gaia so we can improve it in the future.

Thanks for the review! Very happy to hear that you consider it being a real-time saver over editing the terrain manually, that is what Gaia is all about, and it is nice to see we hit this target from your perspective.

Thanks for the positive review! We want to be "the one" as well with Gaia, so we are very happy to have achieved this for you.

Hi, thanks for the kind review! Gaia Pro has a lot of stuff built in already for terrain creation, so it depends on your own taste if you say you need those additional assets. If you for example do not like the sky in Gaia Pro, you can decide to turn the sky / lighting off, and then use the Enviro asset for the sky / lighting instead alongside Gaia. The same goes for the other assets. If this does not answer your question, please send us a ticket in our support system here: https://proceduralworlds.freshdesk.com/support/tickets/new If you are on discord, you can also join our server here: https://discord.gg/TggjQNN

Thanks for your review. I am a bit surprised as we have a dedicated support person and a ticketed support system, however perhaps your issue may have slipped through the cracks. Please go here and follow the links to either find a resolution to your issue or lodge a support ticket: https://www.procedural-worlds.com/support/

Thanks for the review! Glad to hear you were able to resolve all of your initial issues, and thanks for stopping by in discord to ask for help when you were stuck.

Thanks for the kind review! Glad to hear that you are enjoying Gaia Pro.

Thanks for your review. Gaia Pro 2021 run's on Unity 2020 LTS through to the latest release of Unity 2021.1, with 2021.2 support coming when it is released. Additionally, Gaia can do either fully procedural or artist driven procedural where you as the artist can control the generation process. Take a closer look at the world designer ;)

Thank you very much for this positive review! You can find the new features of Gaia Pro 2021 vs. the previous (non 2021) version on top of the product description in the asset store. Note that we also keep adding new Features to Gaia Pro 2021 as well which are paid by the upgrade cost, so thank you again for supporting us by getting the update!

Thanks for the kind review! The feedback you gave us on discord will help us to improve our products further. Looking forward to see what you will create with our products in the future!

Thanks for your review :) Glad you are enjoying Gaia Pro!

Thanks for your review :) Not sure what new features you would want, as its pretty deep already... but as you asked, the next iteration of Flora lands soon, and I am excited to say that i was getting up to 50fps on a scene with 2.6m trees in it!! The next release will be a land mark release from a performance perspective. We also add a lot more to the way we manage streaming and scale :)

Thanks for your review :) Lots of goodies on the way, and you want to see some new and cool stuff, check out how we use Gaia Pro 2021, GeNa Pro and Synty POLYGON Fantasy Kingdom together in our new Fantasy Kingdom Spawner Pack. We will be adding a lot more mobile related capability in the near future... https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/environments/fantasy/fantasy-kingdom-spawner-pack-197927

Thanks for your review ! Yes... it made no sense to do more on this until Unity 2021.2 comes out. But you can expect more here soon as well as they now support a lot of new stuff in the engine itself.

Thanks for your review :) Yeap a lot of work went into it! We have another massive update landing soon as well.. you can expect to see between 2x - 100x performance increase on vegetation rendering !!

Thanks for your review :) Yes I must admit that it does frustrate me when people shoot first and ask questions later. We work hard to deliver quality software that just works across a range of Unity versions and pipeline and while some reviews are fair, the majority of the 1*'s are usually from self inflicted wounds, which could have been avoided if the user in question had reached out to support. To counter this, it makes my day every single time when some takes the time to share how we have helped them on their journey :)

Thanks for your review! We strive to be more better with every release :)

Thanks for your review. Gaia does not throw errors, but there is certainly a chance that you have a conflicting package installed in your project. If you would like help then please raise a service ticket at https://www.procedural-worlds.com/support/.

Thanks for your review :) Yep we provide a bunch of handy runtime automation, but there is no need to use it if you don't want to.