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[nova++]

Not really ready for a full write-up on this yet, but I'm finally feeling confident enough in it to actually show it a little...





Still much to do. I guess mostly optimizations, figuring out ways to reduce some jitter that happens, and increase render distance too.

What will you be able to do on a gas giant?

Not a whole lot. Fly down into its depths and be crushed. Maybe scoop hydrogen from the atmosphere if I end up adding consumable fuel and the like.

[nkm]

Looks awesome!

[Schrompf]

These clouds look soooo fluffy! I wanna fly through them!

[nova++]

Hopefully showing things off too early doesn't come back to bite me. Lately I've kind of felt like I should hold back from saying too much about something until I have enough implemented into the game proper to be able to say a lot about it. But... I can't not show off some of the cloud progress:

[nova++]

I'll probably end up writing a big dev post on the clouds well before they ever end up in the game proper. That's going to be a long process, as there is still a long way to go. There's still artifacting, the draw distance is a measley 10 kilometers, it doesn't yet acknowledge the depth buffer, it will need to wrap onto ellipsoidal planetary surfaces, etc...

but... maybe I am finally onto something







There have been so many optimizations and tunings I've been doing since I became unhealthily obsessed with maximizing the render performance of these fluffy assholes. It is a double edged sword though, because seeing the FPS going sub-150/200 at 1080p is starting to feel like a failure of execution.

I need to learn a lot more about raymarching techniques. Just firing a ray from the camera's near plane to the far plane isn't going to cut it, no matter what sort of checks I do to cancel rays that won't hit anything.

[nova++]

I was craving working on something simpler so, true to form, I accidentally fell down a quaternion hole trying to prototype an auto-leveling landing gear.

 

Funnily enough that second one was using almost right method. Really hard to explain why it didn't work, though. Oversimplified version is that it has to do with the feet not having an instantaneous response.


Eventually after far more time than I will admit to, it started working:

And after all that, because it had given me so much grief, I spent a bit just tormenting it:

[Schrompf]

You have to write about how you did the clouds. They look so fluffy.

And congrats on the landing gear. It sounds reasonably simply to execute, until you actually start to implement it.

[nova++]

And now the auto-leveler works for arbitrary up vectors, and is in-game yaaaaayy

It's fairly intelligent. It runs checks to make sure it's in a good state for the leveling logic to actually run, such as whether all three feet are on the ground, velocity over land, etc. Once in the leveling state it will stay there until you lift off, at which point it detects it's not longer in a suitable state and returns the legs to their neutral deploy position automatically. There's also a short grace period before it latches off to account for intermittent bumps and skids imparted by the actual act of leveling.

Still refinements to do, like ensuring every leg takes the same amount of time to move, maybe. Smoothly ramping up and down their move speeds, etc. I do kind of like the fact it's not perfectly even as it finds the level position. It feels much more natural, accidentally.

 

This feature means you don't have to be so careful about your landing site to get nice horizon-aligned photos anymore.

You have to write about how you did the clouds. They look so fluffy.

In time... there is still a long way to go

[Schrompf]

Hmmm... large windows and, behind it, bleak landscapes. I'll put some dark ambient in the background and enjoy the feces out of this.

I only hope you find some gameplay so that the player can actually do something with this backdrop. What about this:

you can find Points Of Interest on planets. Once landed, you can get a sensor HUD projected over the windows and the landscape behind. There the player can click on it and cast sensor "pulses" into the landscape. If the pulse produces an echo, she can determine a rough direction and distance from the echo, and then get the engines going again to get closer.

[nova++]

To some degree I would like to have a secret-seeking mechanic, as there are remnants of the past left behind to find, rarely. I don't know what form that would likely take, though.

[Faceplanting Loaf]

quaternion hole

Just reading that gave me 'nam like flashbacks.

Also your planets are looking beautiful. Are you using the High Def Render pipeline? And how procedural is it? I've played around with making procedural planets before but the warping around the poles always make me sad and I stop.

[nova++]

Are you using the High Def Render pipeline? And how procedural is it? I've played around with making procedural planets before but the warping around the poles always make me sad and I stop.

Nah, no HDRP. That always seemed more focused on more conventional game scenes, and I am trying to strike as good of a balance between visuals and performance as I can manage. And suffer from recurring bounds of not-invented-here.

Planets are fully procedural with no heightmaps or anything, so no polar distortion of any kind, and the distant textures (before the mesh part loads in) are stored as cubemaps instead of equirectangular for the same reason. The terrain meshes themselves are based on triangular chunks formed from the subdivided faces of an icosahedron for better uniformity across the surface than can be achieved with subdivided quad spheres. I could write a book on the damn thing, probably.

[nova++]

Here's something different - a concept render I did today.

Something you can find out there. Or maybe it found you.

[oahda]

Oh, my god, you've been doing some really cool things lately. Those clouds are absolutely gorgeous, and the landing gear is really neat!

[nova++]

Hiiiii Im still here, I've been lost in a realm of webdev and python and unnecessary home server junk and other life stuff but here's a chair:



I don't know. It feels off and it's bothering me.

[diegzumillo]

Here's something different - a concept render I did today.

Something you can find out there. Or maybe it found you.

Was about to say "cool planet" when I noticed the shadow. VERY cool stuff. Looks so eerie and intriguing. Borg vibes.

I feel like a lot of the potential for mystery and anxiety from deep space is robbed by the so common artistic excessive lighting. Most games prefer to depict space with beautiful colors and light coming from everywhere. I mean, we know for a fact interstellar space is filled with rogue planets. Imagine an entire planet in such absolute darkness you can only tell it's there because it blocks the stars in the background. That is a goldmine for anyone creative.

Edit: the chair is fine! You're just looking at it for too long.

[nova++]

Somewhere I have a pic of Star Trek TNG I edited so it looks as it really would in interstellar space - just the windows glowing, the rest all black (from an episode where they got stuck in a space hole with no stars, I think).

I have always kept the headcanon of the underappreciated ship that follows the hero ship around in assorted sci-fi media, with a giant spotlight to illuminate the action between stars.

[nova++]

Getting the interstellar navigation screen working again. This time around it's unified with the main one, so the same bodies can be seen just as they are out your windows. That way you can tell if something's blocking your trajectory to a given star.

[vdapps]

Really cool project.

I'll be checking your progress. I'm astronomy and space exploration enthusiast, so I appreciate this type of game. I wanted also to start works on bigger 'space exploration' related project (I made one astronomy quiz game and I'm running astronomy and space exploration related FB page), but for now I ended up with puzzle / platformer game (not much time to develop something bigger).

Planets terrain generator (craters) and clouds generator look absolutely gorgeous!

[nova++]

And now I've brought back the star filtering (more or less unchanged from before, easy to port back over, thankfully...) and added an effect to render a keep-out zone over planets so you know where you can and can't target stars

Really cool project.

I'll be checking your progress. I'm astronomy and space exploration enthusiast, so I appreciate this type of game. I wanted also to start works on bigger 'space exploration' related project (I made one astronomy quiz game and I'm running astronomy and space exploration related FB page), but for now I ended up with puzzle / platformer game (not much time to develop something bigger).

Planets terrain generator (craters) and clouds generator look absolutely gorgeous!

I really hope I can make the clouds live up to everyone's expectations. Getting them rendering at farther distances (out to thousands and thousands of kilometers) is going to be a major challenge...