DEVELOPMENT UPDATES

I've been working on refining the terrestrial planet shader some more, with an emphasis on generating a series of masks for things like the oceans, clouds, etc. This will allow for adding other layers of detail more easily. I also added some turbulence to the surface...

Continuing with the planets refresh, I've been refining the system that generates Earthlike worlds. It was quite fiddly to get all of the various layers combined into a unified global normal map, but ultimately well worth the effort. I'm particularly pleased with how...

Time for our first update on the Next Fest countdown! Right now I'm working hard on polishing all of the various exoplanet flavours, which need a bit of an update and refresh following the move to UE5. These are also the last thing I need to do before I can release...

As you may or may not know, Starship Simulator is officially enlisted to take part in the October '22 Steam Next Fest. That's an alarmingly short 70 days from today, and in that time I've got a tremendous amount of work to do. Starting from today I'm going to begin...

It's been an entire month since I last wrote a proper update, and that's easily the longest we've ever gone without a dev diary, but in my defense, I've spent a great deal of that time learning more in-depth astrophysics while working on the core galaxy and planet...

I've been on a bit of a mission this past week or so, firstly to learn more in-depth astrophysics so I can make an even more accurate galaxy, and secondly to future proof the galaxy generation code so that adding new locations won't mess up the old ones. When you have...

Having gotten the new player character working reasonably well on the UE5 build, I've gone back to getting the new 1:1 scale Galaxy System working smoothly as well. The first step in the process was generating the complete starfield around the ship using the new...

About two weeks ago I decided to take a small break from the galaxy code to work on the character system a bit more. Well, one thing lead to another and I ended up completely overhauling the entire system, re-implementing ALS for the demo, and building a whole new set...

The more I dig into the galaxy system and the more I explore what UE5 can do for us, the closer we're getting to a true 1:1 scale galaxy. In fact, today I tentatively binned the idea of splitting each star system into cubes and went with true 1:1 scale movement within...

Growing up I was always a big fan of space, and to some extent, I knew space was big, but it was not until I started building a galaxy that I truly understood just how big space is. It's truly unfathomably large. When I set about making Starsim I knew what I wanted...