P0_B9

I am still working on the art concepts for the next phase of the project.

I will be adding in new vehicles, new enemies, and new story elements, which will take a lot of time, but it should add a lot more depth to the gameplay.

I have also been looking into volumetric nebulae, gas giants, and clouds.

I can’t find any assets or sample code which work for my project (Most either don’t support arbitrary up vectors, or don’t support realistic sized worlds).

For now, I am just using a simple particle effect system which fades in and out as the player passes through the atmosphere. This works, but it is very basic and does not look particularly good, so I will try to improve this at some point in the future.

I am hoping to start work on the next set of story elements shortly, but I still need to do some concept work to see what is feasible given the time that I have.

I have fixed quite a number of bugs with the project, including some issues with the starfield not fading out properly when the player was on a non-earthlike world, and another issue where weather effects would not fade out when the player travelled back into space.

The main goal now is to try to add a better atmosphere effects for non-earthlike planets. I want the player to be able to travel through a thick, gaseous atmosphere before reaching the planet surface. This effect could possibly work on some earthlike planets too.

The problem is finding a resource that will work with the correct scale for realistic worlds.

I am also doing a lot of work on concept art for the next phase of the story. I am planning to add more gameplay features to the game in the future, in addition to new artwork, etc.

I am still focusing on adding more story elements to the project.

I will probably spend some time on this over the next few months, adding more artwork, more enemies, and more challenges and objectives for the player to experience. I do still intend to include the free roaming mode, but I want to have a more static story experience as well, since this seems to work well.

While working on the story, I have already fixed quite a few bugs and made some improvements. I have also identified some areas that need more improvement in the future, which I will work on when I get more time.

I have fixed some issues with the AI navigatio system, as well as some issues with the space combat and the ships weapons.

I have also been working on some ideas for more story elements, etc.

I have also uncovered some bugs with the procedural generation system. Once of which is fixed, but there is another bug which is triggered when a terrain block is paged out while the AI NPC’s on that block are still beign loaded.

I am still working on this issue.

I have now started working on the third main story for Spiritus Astrum.

This story should be about 2-3 hours long.

I am working on setting up the individual modular elements to it, and testing them.

I have also planned the layout and content of the story.

I have added additional funtionality to improve the story generation system.

In addition to this, I have run some extensive tests with the LLM support in Spiritus Astrum.

I have spend some time creating a “prompt” to be sent to the LLM which includes extensive data from the game, such as weather, time of day and other environment details, the players stats, the AI stats, as well as a multitude of oher variables.

As a result, the responses from the LLM are quite accurate, even when using smaller models.

There is still a lot of testing and improvements to be made here though.

This week, I have been mostly working on the concept for the new region system in Spiritus Astrum.

This system basically divides worlds into large regions, each with their own tech levels, from primitive, to industrial, to modern, to futuristic.

I have enough artwork at the moment to make this system work, although I intend to expand it with a lot more artwork later.

The region system is basically working now, although it is not 100% done.

The system is quite complex, I can add each ground cover object to multiple regions, with a probability for each. So, an item might be common in an industrial region, and uncommon in a modern region, and not appear at all in other regions.

I have yet to fully test this system, but so far, it looks promising.

Crucially, the region system works persistently, using the seed of the terrainchunk to make sure that the same objects appear every time (and in the same location, etc).

Additonally, I have added LLM support to Spiritus Astrum. This, again, is just a concept so far, but I think there is huge potential here that I intend to look at more in the future, when I get more time.

The LLM support works with both LAN servers, local Kobold CPP servers, and loading models directly within unity (Although this seems much slower for some reason). I am using UNDREAM for the LLM support, as mentioned in my other posts on AI.

I have also started doing some more testing and bug fixes. Some issues have crept into the project with all of the improvements that I have been making. There is an issue with shaders breaking when in combat with an AI that I am having difficulty solving.

I have been mostly working on creating some new art objects for the game. I will have these done relatively quickly. I then intend to improve the exploration and story elements of the game.

I have also been working on improving how prefabs are stored and organised in the game, which should make it easier to reuse them later with other art objects.

I have also been working on integrating KoboldCPP support into the UDream LLM asset.

I believe I have solved the problem, it was really just a minor formatting issue caused by the data coming from KoboldCPP not being in the same format as what UDream was expecting.

I have also added a chat-style interface to SpiritusAstrum that will be used for the LLM system when it is integrated. It is very basic at the moment, but it allows for scrolling, and multiple messages to be viewed at once, as well as basic colour coding.

I have also integrated it into the existing dialog systems.

I will probably finish the modelling next week. I still have a few objects to go, and I need to adjust the scale, etc, to make sure everything is consistent.