A3

I have been working on some texture concepts for different elements of the ship model.

I have decided to experiment with using smoothing on the model, and it does look quite good, especially with exterior hull sections, windows, etc.

The only issues are that it increases the poly count, and I can’t seem to smooth part of the mesh without issues. I can only smooth the entire mesh. The interior corridors, etc, shouldn’t be smoothed, only the outer hull sections.

The Art concept for the interior of the ship is going reasonably well.

I am not sure how much detail to add in the geometry rather than in the texture. I will probably need to experiment with this until I end up with a texture style that works.

I need to add sufficient detail in the model to look interesting, but a lot of the smaller details will need to be added in the texture/normal map using Substance Painter.

I have decided to replace the art for the main capital ship in the project.

The current ship is quite basic, and the interior textures especially are unfinished. I think I can improve this, but I need to redesign the layout of the ship.

The aim is to make it more visually interesting and complex.

I will hopefully be able to reuse at least some of the complex interior scenes that I have created, because some of my more recent ones are quite good. I will probably need to modify them though, so that then align properly with the different exterior layout.

With substance painters procedural texturing abilities, this should, hopefully, be possible.

I have completed a basic design for the outside of the ship, which I think looks ok. I next need to get a concept for the interior layout done, and I can then add detail to produce the final art, and begin unwrapping/texturing, etc.

The control optimisations are now also done.

There is still something of a framerate hit when the ship is moved, particularly when this occurs close to a planet (each of the planet chunks needs to be moved separately) but this shouldn’t be a problem. When running in the editor, the framerate is still high enough to be playable, and the framerate in the build would be much higher.

I could possibly use the C# job system to optimise this in future?

The persistent server refactor is now done.

All testing, etc, seems to have worked well, and there don’t seem to be any major issues with it.

I will need to extend and improve this system in the future, but it seems solid enough for now.

I have also begin improving the control system for translating/moving the ship. This system was quite clunky, and needs to be optimised.

After quite a lot of work, the persistent rotation works.

I have also refactored and optimised the existing system, and removed some inefficient and duplicate code.

There are some minor bugs left to fix, but the system seems to be working well now.

The paging system seems to work fine.

It works on the client and the server, so the player can move to a specific location, then quit the game, and resume from the same place. The player can also change control objects, etc, and this will all be stored correctly on the server.

In future, I can use this to allow multiplayer gameplay, because the position of the objects is server based, so I can sync it with all clients.

The next goal is to add persistent rotation to the world. When the player rotates their main capital ship, I am actually keeping the ship itself static, and rotating the world around it. I need to sync this with the server, so that the world rotation is the same the next time that they log in.

I have decided to extensively modify the existing paging system to work better and more efficiently with the loadlevelasync commands.

So far, it is going reasonably well, but there is a lot of testing and other improvements left to make.

The loadlevelasync feature is working well with my existing paging system, but there are still some bugs and issues to fix.

I will probably still need to make extensive changes to the system to allow it to work reliably in all cases, including over the network, etc.

I also need to make sure that it works properly with the in-game navigation system.

Currently, the issue is that I don’t have position information for the scenes that have been unloaded. I need to find a way to store data persistently for objects and scenes that have been unloaded. I need the persistent data to show objects on the nav screen that are too far to be seen visually.

I have added a conceptual system to allow objects to be loaded into and out of the scene with very, very little framerate impact.

This is a powerful ability, and I should be able to use this to create a proper paging system for the first time.

I will need to modify my existing paging system, and overhaul quite a bit of it, which will take time. My current setup is complex, and needs to handle multiple object types.

For example, I don’t want player-controllable objects to be paged out, even if they are out of range. I also want to instantiate/destroy simple objects, and just use loadsceneasync for complex ones.

Loadsceneasync will also allow me to get around the 4GB resource file limit in unity. I was having an issue with my unity builds that was caused by an asset file that was too large. Splitting this into multiple scenes solves this issue.