With all the upcoming space games and all the hype built up, I had to build something myself.
I made a little prototype that allows you to transition from zero g into an artificial gravity field and vice versa. Thats pretty much it.
Here is a little video:
#lowproductionvalue, bars and only 480p. I was a bit lazy, so zero post production done, but should be sufficient.
The space ship isn’t really a space ship, it basically is just a remote controlled gravity provider. Anything but the skycube are stock assets.
The hard part was just the gravity + movement. Since Unreals CharacterMovement assumes that Z is up, I pretty much had to write everything from scratch.
I considered moving the space around a ship that always has Z-up to go the easy route, but where is the fun it this?
First off, well done. I even created an account to comment.
I’m just wrapping up work on another project, but was about to start something similar and was dreading tackling the Z-axis issue with gravity issue. Did you end up solving the problem with C++ or Blueprints?
The heaving lifting happens in C++ with a few interface functions exposed to BP, but I also used BP to prototype and then transitioned the working stuff to C++.
So changing the gravity from Z-Up to an arbitrary vector was rather easy (but tedious), I just had to go through the code and replace all the GetGravityZ() function calls with a GetGravity() function that returns a vector.
The hard part was to make the character always align it’s local up vector with the changing gravity vector without changing the direction the player is looking. Also walking on ramps and steps was a lot harder than I had anticipated
“I made a little prototype that allows you to transition from zero g into an artificial gravity field and vice versa. Thats pretty much it.”
Have to disagree. That’s not pretty much it. Man, I had to watch the video a couple times. It is so moody fascinating. Great background sound, for one. I see a slower pace space battle game or exploration game. This would look great in the Oculus. Me standing on my huge bridge. Lots of potential.
Keep it up!
Thanks man. I really appreciate that. Even though I didn’t focus on art at all, the scene needed some kind of depth to give the feel of velocity when you are moving. From there I remembered good old freelancers nebulas and tried to recreate that disturbing and claustrophobic atmoshpere.
And Oculus is definitely on my list of things I’d like to try out for this.
With so many fast paced “realistic” space sims on the way, I was thinking the exact same thing. I’ve had this idea in the back of my head of a mashup of Treasure Planet (despite never seeing the movie) and the old D&D Spelljammer (despite never playing it) type game, but that’s beside the point.
Denny, thanks for the info, I’ll have to remember that about the ramps and stair cases.
Great work DennyR! I really like the transition that you have implemented between zero g and artificial gravity. I hope to see more of this project in the future. Awesome job so far!
Thanks!
I am still in the idea juggling, brainstorming and mindmapping phase of this project (one would say preproduction if I wasn’t alone^^). I am working on a few prototypes to see if stuff is feasable and would work in a game or not.
Walking on a ship was the top point on my list and I am glad it works.
Speaking of prototypes, I just finished one and prettied it up for a video. I am really excited because it turned out really great, in my opinion. Still having a good 4 hours to upload though.
Finally finished upload… took ages and I have to go to bed…
Anyways, I made a physics driven star system prototype. Anything is completely driven by physics, no fakes, no parenting.
I realized how calm the whole thing is with chill music, but check yourself:
I am still exploring art styles to find something that gives me nice visuals and more importantly allows me to create content is less time. I think I found something I am rather happy with, but as a programmer, you never really now if stuff looks good or not, so here is the screenshot:
Here a screenshot of a biodome that eventually becomes a modular piece of a larger space station.
I am still planning a modular building system that allows destruction and therefore loss of atmosphere and pressure, but that is rather hard to get right, but I am pretty sure I get a prototype done next week.
