Into the cosmos

Oh i did manage to fix the water walking loop a lil more, its not perfect, but i dont understand whats going on. so ill just work on that later

Anyways thats that, big changes i made are that now to place observatories or rovers you need to have a specific amount of scrap on you, i will be turning this into a full fledged build menu so its more appealing, and i will have this menu as a quick hotbar to place blueprints of items. I find this gameloop satisfying as it takes away the management hassle and this game is supposed to be relaxing.

And bro how long IS the queue my bambu is STILL not shipped

Sorry for slow updates on this project, currently working my ass off irl on the UAV project of mine as i have a deadline to finish it.

If i did manage to get a good rep towards this proj, ill be taking the reviewers advice and hosting this game on steam. That developer grant might come in handy ngl

AYEEEEEE DEVLOG TIME

So today i redid the observatory 3d model, gave it some clean nasa
textures, its not upto my standards but its getting there, also fixed
that stupid atmosphere bug now everything looks insanely better.

Added a planet to the launch screen to flex aswell, i think it looks awesome there.

Oh and also i tried to add water walking sound but am failing miserably
but worry not as i will be reworking the soundengine too
later

Taking a moment to give a shout out to my followers who motivated me to
work on tis more also HM all the reviewers who gave incredibly nice
feedback

HOLEE SHIT, ADDED INSANE STUFF TO MY GAME

IT LOOKS SO BEAUTIFUL NOW, I CANT BELIVE IT

So, for starters, since yesterday I have been learning shaders. I fixed that shitty atmosphere shader that I translated from someone else’s shader to Godot. I had to make a lot of changes to it to get it working properly for my game.

ALSO I MADE A SICK ASS WATER SHADER FOR PLANETS TO HAVE.

Then I REWROTE THE PLANET GENERATION SCRIPT.

Now each planet has unique properties like:

1. Ambient temperature
2. Water availability
3. Air density, which determines water availability too

I also tried adding comets and comet trails to the game, but failed tremendously.

Oh, and also, dont go near the black hole.

OH AND I GOT MY PAYOUT, AND I GOT THE BAMBULAB A1 MINI. THIS DAY JUST KEEPS GETTING BETTER

Devlog #idk

Didn’t get a ton of new content added today, but I spent most of the time cleaning up annoying bugs and polishing the game.

The biggest fix was the rocket explosion system.

There was a bug where the rocket would slam into the ground at over 300 m/s… and just refuse to explode. I rewrote the logic, and it’s finally behaving properly.

I also started modeling the mothership.

It honestly looks like absolute dookey right now, but it’ll do as a placeholder. 3D modeling definitely isn’t my strongest skill, so I’m calling this version “good enough” for now.

On the graphics side, I added a proper atmosphere around the planets, which makes them look much better.

I also experimented with chromatic aberration, but it didn’t really fit the style of the game, so I ended up removing it.

Huge thanks to @aloyak for the inspiration and some really helpful rendering tips.

He showed me a much better way to increase the render distance without killing performance, so I’ll be implementing those improvements tomorrow.

Also…

I earned 1085 Stardust on my second ship.

Not bad.

OKAY so really cool changes First of all i fixed major inside
stuff, instead of having 350 lines of gd script files in which i had to
sift through to find the function i need, and then get overwhelmed
later, i made everything modular, All the functions are Nodes in the
scene that hold scripts.

These scripts hold the functions that were earlier stored in the main
.gd file, so now everything is a lot less cluttered and makes my life
easier. I also did the same for the rocket scene as it was getting
cluttered too.

I added chests to the game where you can store items in (dont mind the
invisible hotbar), They will be locations to store your items which will
be scattered inside of observatories, im also thinking of redoing
observatories as this model now looks ugly, and i think this has a lot
more potential.

Oh and also i have decided upon how im gonna make the player create an
observatory, you land on a planet, collect scraps, them build an
observatory, and then everything in observatory would cost the player X
amount of scraps, also abandoned motherships will also provide the
player upgrades for rocket.

I got 3 ratings which im thrilled about, but also kinda sad because the
reviewers prolly playing the itch release of the game and not the actual
one but eh i think its fine, as long as my game is peak.

Next ill be working on making an actual 3d model for the mothership

Designed the actual model for the rover, im pretty happy with how it turned out, i think ill keep it.
tweaked the settings for the rover to get it just right, the only problem im facing is that due to the curvature of the planet, rover js flys off n start orbiting at high speed, i gotta add down force to tis i think.

I removed the inventory cuz it was too wonky, i think ill have a hotbar and a backpack like peak, i think thatll be more immersive than having a stupid inventory. (this is totally not because i went rabid trying to implement it)

So i changed the Help UI of the game, made it look a lil better than that roblox ahh UI, Added mother stations to the game where u can get rocket upgrades, im slowly trying to figure out the game loop, itll be that you are a lonely astronaut in eternal void of space, your kind has been extinct, these ships are abandoned u can repair them and get a specific upgrade from each of them.

Also i made the web version available too, its been 3 days and ive been sitting at 0 ratings just demotivated the hell out of me, the quality of graphics and gameplay is butchered but i had made that clear in the itch page, lets hope people rate it now

Working on making the game loop more fun, Im thinking ill be taking the game towards single player base building story mode type of game, I made a web version cuz i had 0 reviews after 2 days, the web version isnt good at all but its make do, I added rovers to the game now too its insanely fun driving them around the planet and having fun, i will be adding more stuff to the game, inventory system turns out is way harder than i expected so ill do that later.

Enjoy this clip of the game

Made major game optimizations, Am adding a proper inventory system with crafting, I have designed inventory with crafting in past for my cooking game shouldn’t be that hard, But doing it in preexisting is a bit of a challenge. I have implemented a simple hotbar and item system in the game, I also used Godots IK nodes to control the bones, and god damm was it useful, this might come in handy in future. Switch to this camera does make it look a lot better

Okay just fixed another tiny bug, im glad i checked it, when i select
the satellite for an observatory, the UI doesn’t open again, so it made
it impossible to refuel, i fixed that by giving an option to control
satellite now.

I think im set for the ship now, i reccomplied the binaries, the readme is ready to, along with the latest youtube video

https://youtu.be/RQmEh_rwnzQ

Final devlog before ship.

I have polished the UI, remade the boney 3d model, Fixed observatory logic, made other tiny gamebreaking improvements, Also i have fixed animations for boney, added a jump animation.

Major change is 3rd Person camera now, which makes the whole experince even more immersive.

I have playtested it several times, im kinda nervous and hoping it works perfectly as it is on my machine.

Getting the project production-ready.

I’ve finally added local storage for the settings menu, so your graphics and gameplay preferences now persist between sessions instead of resetting every time you launch the game.

A lot of people mentioned in the last devlog that they couldn’t figure out the controls, so I added a “Show Keybinds” toggle in the settings menu (press ESC to open it). It displays the controls on-screen whenever you need them.

I also found a pretty game-breaking bug, so I’m documenting it here for future me:

If you’re mounted in the rocket, enable Show Keybinds, and then hit Apply, the player can no longer unmount from the rocket. I’ll be fixing that later.

I spent some time messing around with Godot’s built-in graphics settings and realized I’d completely forgotten to enable anti-aliasing.

Turning it on made a huge difference, the game looks so much cleaner now.

As you can see, I’ve also added a fuel gauge for the rocket. It helps sell the whole “claiming and exploring planets” vibe.

I also changed observatories so each planet can only have one.

Another gameplay change is that you now have to visit an observatory to dock a satellite onto your rocket instead of doing it anywhere.

Finally, I changed how world persistence works. If your rocket crashes and you reset the game, any observatories you’ve already built will still be there instead of disappearing.

Today i have just started refining the 2/3 stage gameplay

1. i made it so you cant just spam sattelites wherever you want, but instead you have to get them docked on your rocket at the research center.

2. I made the ugly loading screen a little better, i will fix it even more by designing custom graphics for it

3. I revamped the 3d model for the research facility, it has interior and the infamous meme toilet where little boneys take a dookie in unison. (This will be a feature in 3/3 version of the game)

Currently i have fixed some more gamebreaking bug where the ui just straight up didnt work, turns out it was due to my own stupidity of forgetting to hide an transparent panel in the scene tree.

SO, Im now starting to add everything people complained about or found annoying in my first ship,
Someone pointed out i had made the help but the help i made didnt tell what keybinds to use, so i have designed a dynamically UI screen to add guide for button keypress, it was a bit of a tedious job but its done now.

Since i understand that not everyone has a good computer, (I have an RTX4050 with Ryzen 7 AMD Ryzen 7 7435HS CPU with 24 gigs of ram so i cant rely on my laptop to be an average computer) but i know not everyone has these specs so i took the time to code more settings in the settings section, now i can select the major factors of FPS drop in this game.

Also i redid the noise the planets used, the noise textures is used before if you see from earlier videos looks very choppy, unrealistic and creative, now it looks a LOT better.

Currently i haven’t added keybinds UI for the rocket, which ill add later, I will be making a ship soon after fixing more bugs that i delayed for later.

Finally the biggest change ever yet, this took me HOURS of rewriting debugging fixing weird glitches, tried to even recompile Godot at one point, But its done, A truly frame efficient infinite procedural planet generation with randomness and seed integrated in it, this took so much of my sanity, so many broken hairs, but finally i am able to perfectly get it working at 144fps and around 11ms average frame time.

I also optimized the rock generation even more to take advantage of godots multi threading capabilities to take the load off the main thread to generate the chunks for rocks.

Current limitations of this architecture are not the architecture but the godot engine itself, as it uses 16 bit floats to keep track of transform, so if you’re like 100,000 units away from your home planet you start facing very weird glitches, I personally think im gonna keep this glitch in the game as i have no idea how these glitches will affect the gameplay, its like minecraft farlands, i want to see how the world generation breaks, and i dont want to stop the player from experiencing that aswell.

Its not that idk how to fix this, if i recompile godot to use double instead of float i can extend the range of the farlands way beyond that, but its just the matter of personal preference.

I have quiet insane ideas and directions for this project now that ive came so far, its kinda funny how all this became what it is just because i wanted to control a rocket in space.

ABSOLUTELY INSANE ADDITIONS FOR MY GAME THIS TIME.
First of all my first ship was finally reviewed so i read all the reviews and made a mental note of all of them, they were all positive and im very happy people resonate with my project so i appreciate everyone who wrote a very thoughtful review for me i thank you all a lot.

Now in the technical part of the game:
I finally fixed my nebula raymarched shader, now it actually has volume and you can go inside it and it looks absolutely ethereal.

Reviews told me that they would love it if the planets had more details, so details i added, i made a VERY efficient chunking pipeline to scatter debries, and whatever i want on the planet mesh, i am being able to have the whole planet populated with no noticeable drop to performance. I made the script in a way that its a module, so in case if i ever want a planet with vegetation or trees, i can just drop the 3d obj file for that mesh and boom ill have a proper chunk based scatter for that mesh.
I tested the chunks using debug cubes and it works perfectly as it should.

I also added spacewalking to the game, you can genuinely just float in the space and enjoy the view from the outside, this was quiet easy but its an addition that i shouldve added a long time ago.

Also ive finally added randomly generated textures for planet surfaces, these dont look AS realistic rn, but im sure after changing a few parameters and adding proper debrie 3d models, it’ll look absolutely astonishing.

From the reviews i read that i didn’t add any help for what keys to use and genuinely thats on me im too stupid so in future ship ill 100% fix that

Also ive added a feature where you can currently place observatories on planets and use them to control the satellites, This is just for now as for future ill make the player do stuff on the planet first to have their base setup, I dont wanna complicate it too much as this is supposed to be a relaxing game, but i think this much is necessary.

Ive also 3d modeled a tiny astronaut along with his animations and im calling the player boney, i have decided on boney’s lore yet but i can assure yall one thing, it will be insanely deep, and there will be clues for it all around the game, you just have to notice it.

I also have massively optimised the star spawning shader, i am able to have 10s of thousands stars on the screen without having any frame drops at all, i used GPU instancing for this and this is genuinely black magic, I also used GPU bill boarding to help aid the performance even more. Removed the unnecessary calculations and now the sky is denser than ever.

I also herd people wanted me to make a web release for it as the download process was quiet tedious, but i think 2 devlogs ago you can see me in godots compatibility mode, it BUTCHERED the visuals completely so i dont think i can bring myself to do that after spending so much time writing complex shaders.

TODO: Add wormholes, infinite planet generation, coordinate system.

Okay this devogg im glad to announce i have successfully fixed that bug in last devlog which i told yall about, this devlog i added a lot of visual eye candy changes, and a few more functional changes.

For starters i added a settings menu and a homepage so users with low end devices can change the settings accordingly, these settings will obviously be updated as the game updates.

Secondly, ive added GPU instanced particles all around the player to give to the eyecandy factor of the game.

Thirdly i added black holes and their custom ray marched shader to them, they also have the stretch effect of light when u go near them like how they describe “spaghettification” in encyclopedias.

I also added ray marched nebula in aswell, they currently dont serve a specific purpose apart from the eyecandy factor, but to be fair not everything has to have a purpose as this is just a relaxing chill game.

I also changed the music to a different royalty free music, i was genuinely so tired of listening to that track on loop it was driving me crazy.

I have genuinely lost hairs, sanity and life, i have this insanely annoying gamebreaking bug.
Currently if the world has more than 1 active gravity source, the satellite doesnt perfectly orbit the planet it should be orbiting, after a while it looses velocity and crashes, this is absolutely gamebreaking as the main concept of the game is gravity.

I have tried so many fixes, managed to break the game multiple times, but in the end i think i have a clue of whats going on, when i introduced SOI for each planet, the orbit was still terminating with a crash on the planet, i had made it so that if the body is outside the sphere of influence,it sets the gravity influence from that planet to 0, but even if im in my own sphere, i still somehow crash, i initially thought that the other planets might be attracting the satellite, but i think its the floating point calculations that are messing the orbit up, currently i have no clue how ill fix it but ik ill figure something out.
If you guys have any idea what it could be please comment i lowk need all the ideas i can get

Anyways i fixed the satellite observatory logic, refined it a bit more, ran tests, tried to implement multiplayer but stopped cuz other bugs got overwhelming.

I think ill focus more on designing a nice clean UI now rather than bug fix, which ill do later, cuz they do say “make it exist first, make it perfect later”.

Devlog 8 of my epic space game:
Following the trend of making a relaxing space sim game with multiplayer, i added quiet a lot of stuff this devlog, i first of all laid a foundation for future, redid all the buggy code, made all the functions future proof, and then i added observatories, proper satellite controller, and made the satellites be able to control with their respective observatory, now the player can spawn satellites, send them to space or go on a mission, come land back and control the sattelite they have sent to the space.

In future ill be adding dynamic and unique planets that will be randomly generated eveytime you log into the game.

DEVLOG 7 OF INTO THE COSMOS

This devlog i made some really important additions of a help menu for newer players, i find this quiet important as making an orbit around the planet is quiet hard, so i handdrew some quick informative help guide that can help you quickstart.

Also finally ready for my ship #1, i have setup the readme, and made a release for this project, Also uploaded a lil youtube video cuz the guide said so.

Devlog 6 of my epic space game:

This update i added quiet a bunch of stuff i was excited to add.

1. First of all major addition, A Satellite, you can carry it from your
   rocket, take it it in your low planetary orbit and release it in there,
   itll keep orbiting the planet if you made your orbit right.

2. RCS and thrust with VFX for the satellite this was essential as real
   life satellites also have this feature and im trying to nail reality as
   much as i can with this project

3. Finally a better camera, now camera can switch between 2 registered
   entities, and the selected entity will only be controlled by the camera
   so thats pretty neat.

In the video i showcase the rocket, the satellite, satellite boosters
and rcs, landing the rocket, rendezvous with the satellite back again
(not really but eh lets just call it that)

For future im planning to add redocking (its gonna be very hard to do it
in game tho), the game is actually quiet hard its not as simple to
create orbits, if the user doesnt have the knowledge of how orbits are
made then itll be quiet hard for them to understand that, so for the
final release ill also be making a little tutorial.

The video is 1.5x btw

Devlog 5 of my epic space travel game:
Finally added more stuff i was delaying to add

1. RCS thrusters effects, now rcs thrusters also have a thrust cone like
   the main booster

2. Really nice explpsion vfx, now the explosion doesnt look like a low
   effort particle, its multilayered particles now with sound effects

3. Balanced the game a bit as currently landing was quiet hard, so i
   fixed that

Game is coming together really well, personally i spend a lot of time
playing it myself so i know its a banger project, Moving forward i will
be adding satellites, save states, fuel system, multi stage rockets,
production level graphics to the game.
(not posting video as they dont do as well)

Devlog for my awesome space game,

so today i remade the 3d model for the rocket which i was dreading to do but finally got it off, the insane part is that i added a really nice vfx trail instead of kiddie looking particle trail for the rocket, this one looks like an actual thruster and the real deal.

Also added music this time around, i tried to add thruster sound but that wasnt working so left that for some other day.

tommrow i think ill add proper 3d models for planets and make a replica mini solar system (not ours)

The vfx look so sick tho i cant have enough of them

KSP style sandbox game:

Okay so a lot happened since last time, firstly i switched to arch linux as my daily os, and in the game i added planets, RCS, realistic gravity.

a planet is a datatype that has information of the mass and gravity scale of that planet, and it can attract the rocket object, also the cool part is you can have multiple planets and create really creative orbits around them, its almost like were actually in spacec

Added RCS thrusters as landing on planets was impossible without it, rcs uses shift + wasdqe keys to move in all 3 axis, this makes it very playable but not extremely easy, in the video you can see i still haven’t got the total hang of it yet myself, but ik ill do.

Ik i was gonna make a playable release today but due to me wiping windows thats gotta wait a while before it actually happens,

For future plans i think ill add a proper environment that replicates space, have enhanced 3d models with HD textures, rcs particles and stuff, also an actual level to play around in.

Okay game is coming along quiet awesome, i managed to make a proper 3d model this time, it has textures and an ugly ass nose cone which ill fix later, currently i made more quality of life changes, made the rocket more snappier, and made it so you can revive, added a lil bit of juice by adding explosion particles and revamped thrust particles as well. Somehow managed to break the entire camera script, but that was soon fixed too so the game is coming along quiet good.

For the direction aspect, i currently think flying the rocket around the map is quiet fun ngl, watching me maneuver the landscape by trying to not hit anything in process, also added a moon map and made it similar to the moon by downloading the hightmap data and texture data from actual nasa, but i gave up on that cuz the low res one was trash and high res hightmap was like a bajillion gigabytes and aint nobody gonna download this game if its that big. I played around with different gravity settings and realised flying the rocket is quiet easy if youre on moon compared to earth (duh). So IF (big if) i add levels to it, this might be a hint of what theyll be, again i dont like level system as theyre not fun and u get tired of it soon, i might add multiplayer capabilities later with a python webserver running on the server machine so you can battle with your friends too, possibilities are endless, and ill serve yall good with this one.

Like this project and follow me, in the next devlog ill release exe file for this project.

Making an awesome godot game in which you control a rocket ship and you can basically do anything with it, currently i havent decided the direction i wanna take this game towards, i might make it into a demolition sandbox type game, a space exploration game, or a movement type game where you have to reach the destination, like that one cool math game.
till now ive achieved

1. Rigid body rocket with its yaw and pitch controls
2. An animated rocket 3d model
3. A test scene with kennys prototype textures
4. A particle style thrust system

In next devlog i might add sounds, explosions, and gasoline