Month 2 - Digging in

- Generic windows, movable and saveable UI layouts

It quickly became clear that with the variety of parts available, trying to build a generic UI that fits all the different probes a player might build would be silly - there is too many specific data views and too many different scenarios. I've therefore made all the panels into movable windows, that can be spawned and deleted at will, moved and resized. Layouts can then be saved and loaded. In the future, the tabs at the top will be customisable too, so you can create multiple views to switch between during mission. I spent a bit of time figuring out how windows might clamp together or auto-expand to fit beside existing panels or auto-align to other windows, but eventually realised a simple grid setup just makes more sense and is a lot simpler.

It'd be interesting to expand this UI system for multiscreen use one day. Below are two different layout examples.

- Planetary tech, Gaea, tiling, distinct orbital + descent scenes, camera zoomies

Planetary tech, that is everything that drives celestial body visuals, will no doubt be a long term project. Pretty early on I was set on using Gaea for the world generation. I had used it a bit before, and the ability to create different data maps, impressive visuals, tile builds, create repeating terrains, and build LODs, made it a clear choice. Gaea 2 is unfortunately $200 for the licence that allows tile builds, so currently the goal is to work around it until it becomes absolutely needed!

One of the best uses for Gaea is to simulate the underlying structure of a planet, and then use this to generate alternate meshes and textures, useful showing different scientific or photographic in-game probe parts capturing celestial bodies in different ways. For example, a LIDAR scanner might make use of the contour data map in Gaea. A thermal imager might take visuals from a different texture map than the visible light texture, and in Gaea the thermal texture would be based off of some parts of the generation with additional nodes. The crux of it is - it allows exporting lots of different data for a generated world.

The 'orbital' scene and the 'descent/landing' scene are two different setups, although it should be a seamless transfer between them when completed. This allows me to tailor them from a performance and ease of development point of view. The slow capture of probe cameras (at their fastest, 1 image a second), means any minor scene changes are far less noticeable than they might be in a different game. 

The orbital scene will simply use a high res texture over a sphere with height and normal maps to create depth. Highly zoomable cameras allow capturing surface images from orbit - this is done by dynamically spawning the high quality tiles that are within the camera's view. In the future, taking a photo from orbit will be split between frames utilising a custom render pipeline to render a tile per frame, and waiting until all tiles are rendered before the image is taken. This will allow the game performance to be pretty deterministic - just need to balance the performance to rendering a single time!

Below is a screenshot of Gaea 2, a world generated for the first planet.

Gaea 2 screenshot of a textured crater

That same crater, exported at the highest quality available from the free version of Gaea 2, and put into Unity.

- Basic attitude control, Vector selection window

Basic attitude control was added in the form of a simplereaction wheel probe part. It'll stabilize your craft, at the expense of battery power. The vector selection window allows you to target anywhere you like. It may be improved to a more typical navball type sphere later on, but this works for now!

- Multi-data channel data inputs

What happens if you have multiple cameras on your probe? Ensure your probe has multiple antennas, set the cameras data channels, spawn two image windows, set their data channels to the camera's data channels, and you can view them both! On board this probe is a basic 256x256 colour camera, and a highly zoomable 256x256 B&W camera.