P-172: Unity: Space Environment: Part 28: Space Exploration Engine

I have fixed all of the bugs with my current scene, all of my existing code is now working again.

I have also, after some effort, integrated my player with the SEE. I have collision working, and the advanced camera is working. The camera system is a little unusual. It is actually two cameras, one with a long view distance, to render the skybox and distant terrain nodes, and one with a short view distance, to render closer objects. Both of these cameras combine together to render the scene, and this eliminates any z-buffer precision issues. Very clever.

I have decided to integrate the SEE player with my own player, instead of switching to it. I had initially planned to have a separate player and “player with jetpack”, but since the jetpack functionality is really part of the player, I just added it to the player controller. I can switch it on and off easily, and it seems to work well.
I am assuming for now that the jetpack ignores gravity, ie, its movement is very simplistic, and allows the user to essentially “hover” in space. In future, I will need it to take into account the gravity of any nearby planets.

The next, and hopefully final, goal with the SEE is to enable the player to control ships. I am just using the simple demo ship that game with the SEE for now, and the player can already walk around it easily, but I am having some issues with actually controlling it.

It is difficult to post pictures of my progress, since, as I said, the unity editor can’t render the scene that the player actually sees, since it just uses a standard camera with a short view distance. I would need to build the engine and run it as a standalone application, which takes some time.