I had decided during development to price it a bit higher but put it on sale for what I originally promised as a thank-you to everyone who followed this thread and showed their support, but with the 2 week mandatory no-sale period it felt like I was punishing early buyers instead. I don’t want to punish you guys so I just went with what I promised earlier. It’ll go on sale eventually, but not so soon that you’ll feel gypped. Probably not for a good six months.
Hey ,
Thanks for clarifying. Since this is not going on sale for a while, I could’t help myself and just bought it :). Looking forward to the updates! I actually started a simple shooter project a few days ago so I could play around with this lol.
Keep up the good work!
Hehe thanks! If you need any help or have any ideas, let me know!
just wondering but can I add a custom mesh to the orbit of a planet like a space station?
Hey! You sure can - just create a new blueprint that inherits from BP_CelestialBody and add a static mesh or skeletal mesh component to it, then attach it to the orbital system actor.
In the overview map there’s also examples of orbits-within-orbits for things like moons and satellites, or binary systems.
Nice work !
Do you think you could add a way to have a terrain that (roughly) matches the planet features ?
A bit like that : [Request] Planetary terrain plugin compatible with world composition tools - Marketplace - Unreal Engine Forums
Not a crazy overkill lod / spherical / seamless system, just having a terrain heightmap that’s coherent with what you see from space, with a loading screen / animation when you land ( à la Mass Effect)
Is there any kind of readme for this thing?
Edit: Looks great in 3d, but the spacesphere doesn’t show up in orthographic…
The readme is basically this thread, if you have any specific questions hit me up.
That’s interesting about the orthographic camera and the sphere. Is there a distance limit in your camera? Try making the sphere smaller until it appears.
Another thought: the sphere uses triplanar mapping which may not worth with an orthographic camera. If that’s the case I’ll switch it to a different kind of setup. I’ll test some options and let you know what’s up.
Sorry, totally missed this question. I think you could fake it but it’s going to be very, very narrow in how you use it, as in you’d probably want to limit the user to a chunk of the planet. It’d be such an involved setup that you might as well just create the terrain heightmap for your world and then project that on to a spherical mesh and draw that with a custom CLOD rather than using the space shader. This is something I’ll keep looking into but I suspect what you really want is Landscape Architect by Ali Akbar. His tool (when released) will handle massive, deformable planetary terrains that scale down to the humanoid level. Mine is more for planets that don’t need to feel realistic if you land on them.
Wee update: I’ve been asked by a handful of people over the past couple of weeks for a space sphere that acts more like NMS and procedurally changes as you travel. So you’re getting it.
I’ll try to support both the local solar system scale the space shader currently leans you towards as well as the hyperspace scale where stars rush past you.
- Procedural space colours that shift as you travel
- 3D starfield
- Smooth culling of celestial bodies
- Procedural space debris such as asteroid fields (currently these are fixed to the sphere).
This is a big update and one I’ve wanted to do for a while, so keep an eye out for it!
Procedural Wormholes, Black Holes and Spiral Galaxies as superposed animated 3D layers.
I’m already preparing the USS Enterprise and crew.
Does this include any sort of star scintillation? I don’t see it in the settings menu you posted and couldn’t make it out in the video/screenshots. I’d be using it as a skysphere like your third-person example. Also, any chance of the stars having slight variances in color? From your screens, I can see the sizes vary a bit…I’m trying to go for a really mesmerizing/stylistic look and want to see how far this shader can be pushed 
There’s no star scintillation, but it’ll be simple to add. I’ll make sure it gets in with the above update. 
I’ve had quite a few requests for black holes! Doing it right seems like a tricky thing but it’s something I’d like to do in the future.
I am using BP_SpaceSphere. But the Sun’s Solar Flare keeps disappearing after 1 second (seems to resize back to 1.0). Any ideas why?
As far as I can tell relative particle scales are ****ed. The only time they work reliably is when you keep the spacesphere’s scale at 1.0. If it’s still being difficult, try turning the spacesphere sun off and dropping in a BP_Sun instead, as the particle scaling for them relative to their sun scale is a little more reliable.
If you do this you will probably need to edit the BP_Sun template and convert its point light to a directional light and set the properties directly.
Thanks for the quick reply! Was about to edit my post to add another question. But I will post it here since you already replied.
Not sure how to phrase it exactly, but why do planets appear “dotted”:
That’s the selection mask. If you de-select the planet it’ll go away.
The dots on the planet surface doesn’t seem to go away after deselecting. Does graphic settings affect it? My Engine Scalable Settings is set to Epic.
EDIT: I am using Unreal Engine 4.15.1
Hmm. I think I know what’s up. You need to give it some displacement, or you can adjust the cap size. The dots are from where the two spheres that make the planetoid aren’t transitioning fast enough from one sphere to the other.
Changing the cap size worked for me. Thank you very much for the quick support 