I need world mapped (world coordinate) material to mark orbits. Best would be if it used no texture, but only circular gradient.
Problem is that distances from center to orbit may be quite high. Simple scaling makes that line of marker thicker further i move.
And i need same width circular line for any distance from center (the star).
Maybe some polar coordinates trick would work with line mask texture. But i am kind of lost here.
In worst case i dynamically spawn some meshes with dots, but material would be best.
I also had idea of simple morph target material that is just expanding (slice of) circle from minimal distance to max.
But then again this mesh with above material would be best solution.
In our game we just use Beam Particles that adhere to plotted points around the orbit. The only downside is that at large distances or really elliptical orbits, the smoothing of the beams doesn’t perfectly line up to a circular orbit (because they’re based on Bezier interpolation)
i already did some research on that topic as well.
For our game we currently use a particle emitter that spawns one particle every 0.5s so you get a dotted trail behind the planet. I tried around with ribbon particles as well but they usually tend to look not that good if you get really close to it.
Also, I talked ages ago with Christopher Albeluhn (he made a great looking solar system game in udk) about his trails and if I remember correctly he said that he used a torus shaped mesh that’s scaled to fit the different orbits of the planets.
If you have static orbits it could be a decent solution.
Yup morphed torus mesh (or some slice of it) was also my idea. Orbits are static, planets also, i just want them as navigation help.
There is also one more problem:
I have belt of asteroids, its 500 of them. Everything work just fine even on mobiles.
But i want to show them all on map, i am quite sure poor UMG will do seppuku if i try to feed them all.
Best would be painting those dots on texture, but we do not have texture paint function.
Well i may cheat and just make static texture with ring of dots. Or total hax and render to texture at beginning of game.
