Umbra - Major Update!

Ok, I’ll admit I wasn’t too consistent with devlogging as I was with my other projects, so I’ll keep this detailed for that storytelling rating

• So I started by adding the four sliders - the planet radius, orbit radius, speed, and eccentricity. The eccentricity one was probably the most interesting to build because I didn’t want it to just go from 0 to max in one direction, I made it signed so zero sits in the middle of the slider and you can push the elongation either way. Felt much more intuitive to use.

• I also had to add a clamp so the orbit can’t intersect the star — without it you could drag the eccentricity up until the planet was literally passing through the star which looked awful. It recalculates the safe maximum every frame based on whatever the other sliders are at, and goes amber with a little “(max)” label if you’re hitting the ceiling.

• Then I added presets (as always lol): Hot Jupiter, Super-Earth, Earth-like, Eccentric Giant, Grazing Transit, as a dropdown that snaps all the sliders at once. Wanted a way to show off what different orbit types actually look like on the light curve without the user having to dial everything in manually.

• Each preset fires a little toast notification from the top of the screen with a one-liner about what makes that orbit interesting, which I’m pretty happy with.

• Last thing was the reset button — just a ↺ in the top right that puts everything back to defaults and clears the graph.

• Small thing but its actually really useful when you’ve been toying around with this all day 😭, saves me a bit of sanity.

If you want more on what I did and why I did it feel free to check out https://instagram.com/urged.st where I post video devlogs!