DEVELOPMENT UPDATES

This year is going so amazingly quickly. It's been a busy one with regard to the development of Starsim. General:Designed and implemented a new tutorial system.Significantly optimised most game systems.Released our second public Tech Demo.  The Galaxy: Built a...

It's been ages since I wrote a proper dev update, and as we enter into 2023 I think it's a good time to take stock of the past year and have a look at what we've managed to achieve over the past 12 months. In terms of game updates, we pushed 24 release builds to...

I've been splitting myself 50/50 these past few days, between writing about the galaxy generation on the website, and working in-engine to progress the next build. In the game itself, I've been working on getting the prop interaction system working in UE5. Rather than...

How is it already the 11th of August!? Panic is definitely starting to set in I've been super busy with various things over the past few days, but the main thing I've been working on is the Starsim website. There's still a fair bit of writing and organising that I...

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...

I can't believe we're a week into the countdown already! Today I've been polishing and refining the random colour palette generation for the planet-gen, and largely just making sure that it doesn't spit out absurd-looking planets. When you give it free rein to roll...

Bit of a late update today because it's taken me a while to perfect the look I was aiming for on the lava worlds. The challenge has been in remapping the height ranges on the heightmap so that both the lava and the land go from 0-1 while maintaining their relative...

We're now onto the icy bodies, which share a lot of the shader code from the barren worlds. Looking at the icy moons and dwarf planets around our solar system you'll find a fairly significant amount of Tholins giving those bodies their reddish brown hues. I've taken...

More progress on the planet shaders today, which almost gets us to the point where I can put out a new alpha build. Today's big win was getting the various Normal channels aligned properly so that craters (or other detail) supersede the landscape, and the clouds...

I've been flitting back and forth between different planet types today and also trying out various different approaches to generating the layers of detail we need. Each planet needs to be built (literally) from the ground up, applying layers of ever-increasing detail...