Over the past couple of days I’ve been finalising and polishing up the spawning system for the procedural planets, and while I was at it I decided to improve the visual appearance of stars because they were looking somewhat bland. They now have active coronas and random flare activity.
Here’s an example of Sirius (B Class) and Wolf 359 (M Class) sporting the new additions:
I was going to put the new build out yesterday, but it turns out that a recently updated plugin now fails to package in UE5. I’ve reached out to the developers to fix it, but sadly they’re estimating that it will take several days for them to fix the problem.
Generally speaking I’m a great supporter of plugin developers because they can save people a lot of time and effort when it comes to implementing certain features, but this is the perfect cautionary tale as to why you should be careful to not over-use engine plugins.
At the time of writing Starsim is currently using 5 engine plugins for game functionality, and another couple for some Editor-only functions, but really that’s about my limit. The more plugins you add, the more you begin to rely on third parties, and the less control you have over your codebase.
We’ve been keen from the outset for Starsim’s development to be completely transparent, so you’ll always get the raw facts, warts n’ all 