Devlog 28
OK ive fixed/implemented three major things.
1: camera finally logarithmically zooms and moves in a way that i am happy with. There is only one problem left now, and that is that it cant follow a moving point yet, however this shouldn’t be too bad i hope
2: ive changed my data so that the planets are now aligned with the XY plane(this is not a hardcoded fix so it it still possible to import your own data and it work completely fine)
3: ive made the grid follow the camera(as the camera stays at 0,0 and moves objects around it) and scale logorymetrly too which looks very professional im my opinion
Now onto finishing up the misson planning side of this. ive got a ‘working’ state of it atm but it is quite tempramental so we shall seee
Devlog 27
Yooo Im back. Thank god the deadline has been extended broo. Done mostly boring stuff tbh. Ive begun on working on adding a grid that scales with the camera and im like 60% there. Shaders haven’t really clicked for me yet so im still kinda joining random things to other random things and hoping it looks correct tbh. Also begun work on making the mission planner automatically sort and setup lambart test cases for my solver to solve(ive actually done this already, however its really hard to validate if my resluts are anywhere near correct, they look correct but i have no numerical way of knowing, so ima go with the ignore it untill something else goes wrong and hope its fine idk)
devlogs will prolly be focused on fixing the camera movement(zooming is a massive pain as its really hard to know when you want to zoom massivly or small - like you want to be zooming out fast if you want to go between planets, but if you want to go between moons or something its hard:( ) and misson planner aspects of this project for this week or so. So boring devlogs. cant wait till i can finially ship this and you can all have a go.
Devlog 26
yo guys horrible news 😭 ive gone and done it, boken my finger(if for the dumbest reason every too bro). Which means that i generally cannot type anywhere near as fast as usahll. Dw your still gonna get your ushall yap sesh tho. Im hoping that this dosent afect the timeline or anything of my project, but i have been busy. First ive started adding sound effects which are generrally a bigger pain than i thought. But now every button/ui action has an effect. however there is not music/ambiant noise. IDk weather im going to add any music but i think a low rocket engine would be cool(lets pretend you can hear sound in space). Done a bit on the code side, but really most of it has been UI. ive cahnged the hitboxes of the buttons to fit them, which was a pain as i have like 50 at this point. Ive made them hilight when you hover over them and things like that. But one thing im really confused on is when the deadline for this is? Like i got an emial saying oct 31 as they extened it but now theres this think with bukubuks or something and im not sure what that means? if you know can you leave a comment or something pelasee.
Devlog 25
Added a main menu. This was actually a massive pain as i had no like localised start function. So this meant that scripts and objects were doing things they weren’t meant to. So had a minor architectural overhaul. but now it works. Also ive added a way to quit the game too, in both the sim and the main menu.
Also yes that it the orion capsule thing, why? Its the only textured model i could find for free. (Kinda, i had to download a 3d print 3mf or something, and i wish i was kidding but spend a few hours a few weeks ago literally assembling the model in unity, so this may just beat garten of banban for the most optimised topology of the year)
Only 8 days left and i am so screwed, this entire menu was a massive procrastination from fixing the physics(it keeps slowing down the timestep to like 1e-9 seconds and i cannot figure out why, i have literally almost rewritten my physics at this point and i have had minimal difference - also the cameras bugged as hell when its following a moving object)
Devlog 24
Ok one section has been finished. Its a small one but its done. This was m first time working with files and making documents so icl the code is like 85% spaghetti unassisted mess, but it works. It allows you to export data for planets/moons that you want in either JSON or CSV format. Also the ui is fully wokring with this one for once.
Sorry for the most boring devlog of the year here but their prolly gonna get worse as i start doing more boring things to finish off this project. I promise you tho the final project is gonna so cool so follow me if you want to see it.
Omg im tired bro, ive caught whatever is going around at sixth form and i am generally on teh brink of death, generally json/csv files may be the most boring thing possible to do this felt like so much more than 3h.
Anyway see you next devlog.
(sorry for boring picture, this is pretty much all code tbh)
Devlog 23
Yo short one today as its 10 45 atm and i have homework for tmorro 😭. This had been a bit of everything today so im just gonna list it out.
1: fleshoed out the help menues
2: made the info chip work(bottom right), im really porud of this one as it usesa que system so you can just keep on adding notifications/warnings and it will show them all (fun fact this is the only thign so far that has worked first try so thats why i love it so much)
3: started adding a way to export the data (so far ive only gone as far as making ui and auto generating teh directory)
4: almost fixed the camera controller(this is so close to working, but ive spend like 3h on it already so im not touching it for a bit)
5: a few other code things
only 10 days left now 😬, so i need to be finishes up features pretty soon (im hoping to get the mission planning element of this findied by the weekend/sunday, and then spend the rest of the time making it presentable and usable)
Devlog 22
Yooo. Things are looking up. Ive implemented the lambert solver fully so you can do a controlled burn to jump orbits (shown in the vid below). And ive managed to add in accurate date/time tracking at the bottom of the screen (however there are a few bugs that you will defiantly be able to spot). Only 11 days till this needs to be done and i have much more than 11 worth of things i need to do(and im already skipping out on alot of stuff for my A-levels for this so once i finished this ive got about 3 weeks of stuff to relearn 😭). I think im going to get the physics and spacecraft stuff done within like 4 days i hope and just do quality stuff from then. One thing though, optimisation has not gone as well as i had hoped (topping out at about 20 fps on my laptop, so if you have a decent pc that has a gpu with more than like 5 cores you would prolly be fine but idk yet), but i am hoping to get this running on my laptop at a usable rate. but we shall see. Also like the post 🙏🙏. Last thing, in the vid the sim speed up and down, it wont do that in the build i just got impatient and manually forced it to go faster 😭. Last last thing, you can move the camera, i just didn’t in this vid.
Devlog 21
Its been a while (18 days), but its been a pretty busy two weeks tbh (A-Levels started on the 4th and ive got 4 to worry about 😬😭). But i have done a bit of progress. Ive managed to implement a fully working lambert solver into the project, you can pick two objects and a time of flight and boom you get a start/end velocity . If you depart from your body at the specific velocity that you can calculated then after your set time you will be at your target destination - kinda. This is a very simple algorithm that only accounts for the sun’s mass(sometimes) and the two points you want to reach, so there can be ‘noise’ from other planets and gravitational fields that can cause drift. How am i gonana fix this? Idk this is only the first layer of the misson planner so maybe it will go away once i add course correction using my already implemented IAS15 solver 🙏🙏. Also i have added in the orion crew modle as my first spacecraft (this is going to be theoretical misson planneing so the modle is really only for looks, as there i no way i can get anything remotly close to something like ksp, nor do i want to, this is more of a ‘is this possible and if ti is what path should i take’ kina misson planner yk?)
idk.
Delogs may speedup or slow down depending on how school goes tbh, i really want to get this done by sep 30th so i may have to sacifice some ui deicision and posilse to get it working. so be nice when u guys take a look at it please 🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏.
Devlog 20
OK added a new feature. So atm my code on startup was taking the current date and finding the closeted date that i have provided data for(pos/vel). This was working fine but if you wanted to jump from now to next year you would have to have waited ages. So ive fixed that. This is also the fist ui i’ve made entirely in unity instead o figma, and i wont lie i really like how it looks. But as you can see the ui took 7h to get fully working (i hate ui so much dude 😭) there was like a bajillion edge cases and flags and things i needed to setup, not fun tbh. But im really proud of how it works and looks. Up next is not optimisation😭, im gonna start looking into implementing a lambert solver and a bacis spacecraft controller as this project is going to turn into a mission planner hopefully very soon (i hope, sep 30th is too close bro)
Devlog 19
Optimise❌. Add and fix features ✅. Yup more procrasonation, but i have a massive list of changes.
- The planet Preview in the UI no longer shows missing textures when there is no texture for the object, this is done with a deterministic shader i made using the moons id to color it in game and in the UI.
- I’ve added a taskbar at the top that i’m really proud of tbh, its easily expandable and easy to use now
- Fixed the labelling issue with the moons, as unused labels were not being dealt with correctly and would just stay on screen(this was actually a massive pain to do 😭)
- +50 other small anoying fixes
What i still need to do tho is fix the fittery nature of the orbits, its because the orbits update their position before the camera updates its world position(the cameras stays at 0, 0 and a script updates the positions of everything within range accordingly, however this code runs at the start of the frame and the camera updates at the end, this shouldn’t be a difficult fix but i remember coding the camera to update late in the frame for a reason so this may be harder than i think)
Devlog 18
ITS WOKRING. Ive attached a vid below(sorry for quality idk why its like that) and i will admit there are a few issues. Main one rn is optimisation, however that should be fine this is all being run on one thread and there are like 5 separate opportunities for parrailation, im not too worried about that. However, ive encountered one issue, in this i have forced the simulation to run faster than it wants to. The integrator i am using has a dynamic time step, so if two objects get close or get to fast the simulation slows down to more accurately simulate this. For the last few days my timestep ahs been stuck at 10^-9 of a second 😭, i have manged to fix this a small amount but i think the problem is in my data. Atm i have ~100 objs and i only just realise that i have two asteroids in a binary orbit within 2500km of each other, which is almost certainly causing the issue. idk what to do tbh, i think my only option woul be to delete one fo them from the data(not too hard if im being honest), but ima do a final check tomorro. but apart from that im so happy i finally got a semi working project now.
Devlog 17
Major update, physics is working. However it is 100% wrong atm, marse flyes out of the system at supersonic speeds and neputne starts to fall towards the sun(pic below😭). I have no idea what could be causing this as i have spend so long looking at the code. I was hoping i would have this finished much faster than this tbh but yeah. My best guess is a div by zero or a verry small number causeing problems, but that can only happen if there are two bodys extreemly close together so idk. Anyways I hopw to get this fixed within the week so i can finnaly start working on what i want to work on(like this was meant to be the easy first step of waht i want).
Devlog 16
Ok, physics is fully implemented, kinda. Ive got the logic down, but i haven’t managed to simulate even one step yet 😬. Theres like 20 reasons why, but the majority of them are NaNs so far which suprised me tbh. After a while i gave up and began working on the UI a bit more, it only took me a hour or two to setup but i think it looks good, you are able to input the wanted speed of the sim, and eventually it will show you the speed its running at (as the integrator i am implementing does not take uniform steps and adapts its step size the simulation speed will fluctuate like 100%). But i think tomorrow or atleast in the next few days the physics will be working, as i can feel that it is so close. but once this is done i can finally move onto the thing that im much more well researched in, mission planning(more in the projects bio if you want to see what i mean)
Devlog 15
Did it, i’ve managed to get the labels to work. There are still a few visual things i want to fix (like they look horrible atm). And they dont resent properly yet, however ik why its just gonna be a pain to fix. I think ima decrease the font size a bit and add some deterministic colors? But one thing is that you can click on these labels like you can with the much eaiser to code planet ones and it will show you a popup of the object/calc its kep data and allow you to fly to it automatically which im pretty proud of.
Devlog 14
Ok still putting off physics atm, butttt ive done some stuff. Ive done a bit of optimisation, like ive split up the rendering into layers, so there a camera that renders the background, there a cam that renders the planets and a cam that renders the orbits. Because of this i can have separate scales for each camera, so whist the planets/moons are scaled down by 10000x, the orbits are done by 10000000x. meaning i can reader eve pluto in a single frame with a semi useable clipping plane. Ive also made it so you can click on a planet and it will automatically update everything, which i have been wanting to do for ages as i now do not need to use the inspector anymore to update what planet we are looking at. However there is still one issue, this only works for the 9 objects that have a dedicated label, the other 100 moons/asteroids are innecesable. I want to make it so once you zoom far in enough to a moon its label will show, however for planets like jupiter they will all overlap and look bad, but i dont really want to add anymore overhead to the UI rn and idk what to do, like if you have two that overlap which one do you hide? But hopefully once i finally decide to finish the IAS15 ill move onto phase 2 which is implementing mission planning(this is what im better at so it should hopefully pick up soon).
Also one thing do the orbits look better when their full or when they taper off? I prefer full but idk
Devlog 13
Ok major update. I have managed to implement thee and a half things rn. 1: the UI is fully working and scales and moves with the window if you resize it. 2: the Ui calculates the keplarna elements of any body using no hardcoaded info. 3: i am able to use these elements to do a crude simulation of one orbit allowing me to visulise the orbits. 3.5: I half implemented IAS15 got stuck and decided to do steps 1-3. However as you can see its running at 39 fps which is just not going to happen. Annoyngly my code only takes up like 2ms however the way i have set it up means the camera is incredibly resource intetive(i had an issue with not being able to see the orbits so i just made the clipping plane of the camera a stupidly large number. I think theres a way to make a Ui shader or smthin to visulise the orbits, however i aint that smart and i hate hlsl so much bro 😭) If i made the clipping plane smaller and optimised my end a bit i could prolly push this to like 100 as thats where i was at before idk tho.
Devlog 12
Ok, tbh physics hasn’t been too bad so far. Ive spent a few days on it and its almost there, not much to add on that - next devlog or two will be finishing it up and making it multithreaded. In the meantime ive been working on some UI and im pretty proud of it. Like it could be better but its the first Ui ive ever made and it took like 2h to setup so its staying. (whats really cool is that you can change the size of the game window and it will automatically resize itself). However ive run into a weird issue. So for the UI im rendering a preview of the planet. And i have done everything that i can think of to optimise this but this camera is tanking the entire project by about 20-30fps(its worse rn as i have deep profiling on atm) and i have no clue why. Like if you can think of a optimisation ive prolly already done it. But anyways its prolly something simple that i keep on missing. A preview of the porject is below - ignore the numbers about earth they are wrong.
Devlog 11
Ok major update. I’ve rewritten the core code from the base up as I had so many unnecessary lists/arrays/variables etc. Also ive rewritten the camera controller to be smoother and easier to use. Yes this is still procrastination before implementing physics. I promise that in the next devlog I will have the physics working. (or atlest partially)
Devlog 10
Before I implement physics i decided to procrastonate with optimisations. Good news: its now running at 200fps(used to be like 150ish). Bad news: Ive got to athually implent the physics. Ive been reading up on it and i understand a two body 2d form of IAS15, but ~100 ish body and 3D not so much. So the next few days may just be devlogs of planets moving hopefully where they should. Oh i also started to implent a trail that follows the planets, but its proving diffucult as ‘planet-space’ and ‘world space’ are complete diffrent local tranforms and for some reason i just cant figue out a fast way of converting between them (I have one solution but it does an unnesasay amount of divs per frame, which is eating up processing power that should go to physics). But so far this is it, oh i also added a ring that goes around the planet but ive not got a screenshot of it and im not waiting 5m for unity to open so js imagine rings next to the labels in the same color as the label
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