By
@AustinB
Astral Space Laboratory. Ill update with a propper desc soon but the gist is just a soalr system sim that you can plan missions in (its more intesring than it sounds i swear) this is my first large scale project too so atm its going slower than i was expecting
BIg things comming
Not really a devlog, js messing aroind wih optimasations n other stuff tbh (its like 11:30pm for me rn i just wanna get the time logef fir the last two days)
Massive change from last time. So for context atm I am building a solar system sim as a core for this project. And ive been trying to create some sort of method to simulate the moons without any heavy computation, as I assumed physically simulating ~500 objects would not be feasible. To put it lightly, ive wasted my time. Ive done a bit more research into the integrator i am planning to implement (IAS15), and turns out it can handle 1000 ish object just fine (even on a laptop) at only a few milliseconds per loop. So Now the next few days I will probably be spending on research on IAS15 and optimisation tricks for it. Something i need to decide soon is if this is going to be c# or hslsl as its alot of computation (so good for gpu) but its lots of complex computation (better for CPU). IDK tbh im larping CS atm, i have no idea what’s slow for a computer to run.
Short one today. Ive sorta got about 5 diff things om activity workig on for this project atm, so i thought ill finally explain what this is. So the bameof this projct is Astra Labs (Still a work in progress rn) and its a mission planer. What im working on atm is the soalr system simulation and accurate inital data. But at the end of this you will be able to select a start/end pos and (this ive not figures out yet) be able to test oit hypothetical spacecrafts/routes. Im not selling it well tbh. Tryst me tho in like 3 months this is finna be 👌
The past few days I’ve been looking into NASA’s spice database, which is an incredibly powerful tool to get data about the solar system. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned yet but the core of this project is a solar system sim, which I’m hoping to be accurate to about 100yrs or so (probably less in the end, but I will push it as far as my computer can handle). To do this I’m using the RKF54 integrator(sounds scary but it’s just a glorified mean (kinda)), which is incredibly powerful and can be incredibly precise. But it still requires initial precise data, which I will use spice to generate. Now, spice is an incredibly well documented program, but from what i can find, its strength is python and C; neither of which unity supports (tbh i havent tried yet, but i assume). So at the moment ive tried like 50 different wrappers and plugins, and so far no luck. But its almost 100% on my end as I do not follow the website very well 😅. I’ve done a few other things in the meantime though, like ive finished my object shader(and my earth one too) and finally imported all the planet/dwarf planet textures. Once ive got spice to work, progress should hopefully start to take off.
Today I managed to finally get the camera working. Its not fully there yet, like I want to add logarithmic zooming and other minor things, but the core is working. The camera stays contently at the orgin, with objects moving around it. This gives me two main benefits, 1: i can store the cameras ‘real’ position as a double3, which removes all jittering due to floating point errors. and 2: culling objects is much easier as as part of the update loop on moving the objects involves calculating the distance between the objects, allowing us to cull all objects at a certain distance with virulently no more expense.
Ive also began working on the UI, but its more of a ‘just making it work’ UI than a ‘looking nice’ UI atm and graphic design will come much later.
OK stepped back from shaders. I’ve spent the last 3 days working on my camera movement script. I got the initial movement down on the first day. However, this project is using massive scales, so a float vector three isn’t enough precision. So (and im not fully done yet) but i’ve spent the last few days doing two things: 1: updating everything to doubles, 2:keeping the camera at the origin, and moving the scene around it (this way means we only work with objects around the origin)
There is still lots to do tho but ill be back once ive managed to make the camera script to work.
Shaders are the best bro
I went into this thinking that i would hate learning hlsl and all of that. But to my surprise unity has a visual scripting system that works similar to scratch. I just wrote my first lighting shader ever in like 20m. 20 minutes is crazy, it took me 30m to make a hlsl shader that turns an object orange. ve attached what it looks like down below
Ok this is my first devlog of Astra. I wish i had more to show for 30h of work but sadly I corrupted my entire project about 20h in 😭 loosing about 2-3 days of progress. Luckily Most of this time was spent on building the architecture and importing/creating textures. I still have the google docs that I’m writing my notes down and thats got most of my ideas for the architecture. (by architecture i mean setting up scripts and gameobjects like ‘physicsSolver’ or ‘simManager’, this is probably not what architecture is but idk). However I had spent so long on my cameraColtroller script which was lowkey really cool. Like it had complete freedom in the scene and could move anywhere, you could select an object and the camera would smoothly ‘fly’ to the object and you could orbit around it. And this is the one thing i haven’t rebuilt yet. But ill see you in the next one when it should hopefully be rebuilt?
