P0-A4

The art is continuing to go reasonably well.

I have not started any unwrapping or texturing yet, I am focusing just on the modelling.

I was able to reuse some of the art from my previous example scenes, but not all of it.

I have significantly reworked the interior design for the main sections of the ship.

I have made it quite a bit smaller than it was, and populated the space with far more details, to make it look visually more interesting.

I think the slightly claustrophobic, cramped, look works well and adds a lot more visual appeal.

I am continuing with the art improvements. I intend to get most of the new ship design done this month.

The current objective is to model the main reactor core and connected rooms and compartments.

This is going reasonably well, and the art style and design is looking quite consistent with the rest of the ship.

I have added some detail to the model that I am working on.

I have also found out how to combine smooth surfaces with flat surfaces on the same model without distorting the geometry.

I am trying to keep the entire hull of the ship, exterior and interior, as one model as much as possible because that will prevent small holes or gaps, which can be very obvious.

All interior objects, etc, will be separate objects.

I am now working on some improvement to the art for this project.

The main goal is to find a workflow that I can use to create a complex interior and exterior scene with high-resolution textures and no gaps or holes in the mesh.

I am also trying to improve the quality of the art as much as possible.

It seems that the 64-bit precision and long-range movement from the origin does work.

I suspect that it will need a lot of testing and debugging, but the concept should work ok.

The improvements to the persistent location system seem to be working reasonably well.

I still need to test them extensively, but everything seems to be working very well so far. Only the player control object is stored with 64-bit accuracy, but most of the other objects are created procedurally, so their position doesn’t need to be in 64-bit coordinates.

I need to spend some time debugging and testing this system further, before I work on the next feature.

I have created a concept that allows me to save and load the player control objects position with very high precision.

This allows the player to basically travel to anywhere within the world, save, and then resume from the exact same position and rotation, regardless of the distance from the origin.

I still need to integrate this into the current system, but it should work well.

The rotation seems to be working reasonably well now.

I still need to test it more extensively, but it seems to be generally working.

The next thing that I need to do is to fix the issue that I found with the players position after quitting and resuming the game.

This position is stored in 32-bit precision, not 64-bit precision, and I need to find a way to fix this so that I can store the players position exactly.

Assuming there are no more issues with the AI navigation on a rotating object, the final major issue to solve is the fact that I can’t use baked lighting on a static object.

This means that I can’t use emissive textures, which is very important for my projects look and feel.

However, it looks like I may have some options here.

Unity may be releasing a real-time ray-tracing based GI solution (Experimental DXR) by the end of the year, which could also add support for features like real time emissive textures. I haven’t tried this project yet because it requires an RTX series card and I don’t currently have one.

I believe it also requires the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) to work, which would be a problem, since porting to this from the standard pipeline, which I am currently using, would not be easy.

There is also a product called “HXGI” which has not yet been released, but which should also provide real-time GI, hopefully without requiring a port to the HDRP.

There are a few other products that I found, (for example SEGI) but these seem to be mostly abandoned or obsolete.