Art and Designs

I seem to be making some progress with the rotation and translation of the planets around the player.

There is still quite a lot to do, but I think I am close to a solution.

There are a few issues making this more difficult, including 32/64 bit precision, and the fact that the entire world needs to be translated as the player moves far from the origin. I also have to think about the fact that the user can control multiple ships, and they can land on the surface of planets.

I have fixed quite a lot of long-standing bugs, and added some stability improvements and some new features.

I have also replaced all of the legacy text in the project, to prepare for an update to Unity 2018.1 (which should be out this month).

Most of the major debugging is done now, but I have changed a lot of the code so extensively (while improving it) that I may need to retest certain things, to make sure that I haven’t introduced new issues while fixing old ones.

I believe I have finally finished the art concept that I have been working on.

I intend to continue making changes and improvements to it, adding rooms, etc, and eventually create an entire, fully-functional, ship, with working controls, etc, which I can then use in the Main game.

For now, it’s just a graphical demo, the player is able to just walk and look around, but I think the graphical quality is a big improvement over my previous work.

There are still some issues with the scale, the Operations room is ok, but the doors and the living quarters that are connected to the Operations room are too small. I should hopefully be able to scale these up without making the Operations room too big.

I have been doing a lot of experiments into emissive lighting in unity.

I have successfully enabled baked lighting, which looks great,but it won’t work on dynamic objects.

I have also managed to get light probes to work, but unfortunately, as far as I can tell, light probes don’t work if all of the objects in the scene are dynamic.

For example, light probes allow me to bake light from a static object (such as an object with an emissive texture) and then have that object cast light on a dynamic object (such as a player, etc). The problem for me is that I want to have moving players walking about a ship which is also moving, which means both the ship and the player would be dynamic. It doesn’t look like light probes will help here, and I can’t seem to find another solution for dynamic emissive textures.

I am currently going back to using realtime lighting, but I am hoping that I will find a solution for dynamic emissive textures in future, because they really do add a lot of realism to dark, sci-fi style scenes.

I have also modelled and textured some simple interior objects, like doors, for the art concept.

I have imported and set up all of the objects that I textured in Substance Painter in my Unity scene.

After some adjustments of the settings, etc, I think I have managed to get the textures looking relatively close to the way they look in Substance Painter.

I was previously having issues with this, but I am quite happy with the results that I am getting now.