Here’s our first look at the development process of AVE II.
We started out by using the Lyra Starter Game as a reference, mainly for how it handles UI, communication, and project structure. It uses Common UI with material-based elements, the Enhanced Input System, and a clean, modular framework.
Even though most of the Blueprint logic is accessible, many of the base classes are written in C++, so we had to spend weeks digging through the project to understand how everything works. It took some effort, but it gave us a solid foundation to build upon.
One of the first features we tackled was improving camera navigation. Specifically, the ability to orbit around the mouse cursor, similar to Google Earth.
In ArchViz Explorer, orbiting was always locked to the center of the screen. This felt clunky, especially on touchscreens. So this was something we wanted to fix early on.
On interaction, the New Navigation System fires a ray trace to detect where the cursor is pointing in the world and sets that point as the new orbit/zoom target. From there, the camera updates its direction and distance to match the previous frame.
It sounds simple on paper, but getting it to work pushed the limits of what we knew in terms of Blueprint logic, math, and geometry. We spent weeks iterating before finally getting a version that was working properly.
Here is a short video demonstration of the Improved Navigation System:
