Just wanted to spread the word about the Unreal Engine Marketplace Sale, going on now through January 3rd! Alongside some truly spectacular assets, Orbit is on sale, at 50% off! If you’ve been curious about Orbit and haven’t checked it out yet, now is a great time to have a look at all the features it has to offer!
I have a tutorial coming up soon for the new nebula generator, and I’m currently building a website that’ll house more documentation, tutorials and examples for Orbit as well as my other asset, Volumetric Lighting BP (the features of which are all rolled in to Orbit) and will serve as a platform for news regarding more products I’m working on, a place to check out updates on my existing products, and the official website a game I’m currently developing. The site should be ready to launch around the middle/end of January 2017, I’ll be sure to post about it here when it’s live.
Thanks again to everyone for your continued support, I couldn’t do this without all of you!
Hey , amazing work on this plugin.
I was wondering if it is possible to change the cloud, rain and snow ‘spawn meshes’ (I’m not sure of the correct term, hopefully you know what I mean).
My playable area is a sphere with a centre of gravity and I will probably need a spherical cloud plane.
My current workaround is a rotation offset for the skysphere and the player to give the appearance of consistency, but I appreciate with a cloud plane this may be more difficult to achieve?
Regards,
Spherical cloud layers is something I’ve been meaning to work on, it’ll take some time to achieve but it is on my to-do list. I’ll have to get back to you on this, but it’s on my project Trello if you’re interested in tracking it there
I’m trying to use Orbit_BP and it’s working great, except that when it starts to rain I’m getting this warning “LogAudio:Warning: Detected orphaned looping sound ‘S_Rain’.”
This may not seem like much of an issue, but when running with a debugger attached this halts execution and is getting very annoying.
Any suggestion on how to fix this? Are other people running into this?
Lovely. I likely won’t be using stratus clouds having looked a little deeper, but it’s good to know the option will soon be available.
Another question - if I set the orbit BP to use the system time, will this also change the seasons as real-time seasons change? Thanks.
It will still change the seasons as days pass, but it won’t track what season it is in your timezone, it’ll just start at whatever the current season you have loaded and then cycle sequentially through.
I see, would this be a simple modification in order to tailor it to my needs? Would it just be a case of an event checking the system month on load and changing the season preset to match?
Essentially yes, I’ll have a look at all the requirements when I get home from work and I’ll update the thread here. More than likely I’ll just add configurable months as a feature, should be able to knock it out this evening.
Thanks man… one more question, I was wondering if it would be possible to introduce a planetary time of day system using the orbit system here… I’ve created a thread about it here if you have any nuggets of wisdom on this.
Hi, Christian question with the rain and snow cover system… how do i get my water mesh plane to act as the top of the cover system… don’t want the rain or snow falling underwater.
Your water mesh probably isn’t thick enough to affect the mesh distance field, so you’re left with some options; you can check your player location, and if it’s Z location is lower than your water plane mesh around the vicinity where your water plane mesh is, you can toggle the rain particles off. Or, you can create a large cube mesh (with no collisions) with a masked material with a 0 constant plugged into the Opacity Mask node and line up the top of it with your water plane mesh. This will act as a “culling volume” which you can place, but you need to make sure that you’re scaling the cube uniformly, otherwise the mesh distance field will have “holes” in it.
Alright sorry about the wait, I’ve been a bit stretched for time lately, taking on too many creative projects haha.
Anyway, I’ve implemented logic to opt in to set the season by a manually selected month, or by the current month at the end user’s location, accounting for seasonal differences between the northern & southern hemispheres;
I’m still looking at round-planet stuff, that’ll likely take a bit longer, but the calendar update that I’ve described here should be ready for the marketplace by the end of this week/early next week, depending on how long some of the other features I’ve got cooking take to finish.
Hey all, just wanted to give a quick word on the state of Orbit and my plans for it.
Right now, Orbit works as it was originally intended. However, I’ve been reading some feedback and discussions about it, and it’s reinforced the notion I’ve been having that it needs some serious refactoring. Through this thought process, I’ve decided to revisit how Orbit should do what it does, which will require a pretty major re-write of most, if not all, of the code and functions in it.
So in the coming months, working around/in tandem with Woodbound development and some tech-art contracts I’ve taken, I’ll be re-building Orbit from the ground up, focusing more than ever on performance, ease of use, networking, and modularity.
Without going on too long of a tangent, the general idea for the way Orbit will work revolves around separating the moving parts contained in the single actor class that users interface with into their own respective pieces that will work together. This will allow for developers to fully leverage the most power out of each portion that they need, while only using the pieces that pertain to their project, easing workload on themselves as well as on hardware, and mitigating unnecessary efforts into unused parts. This re-write will leverage several of the new and updated features in the latest UE4 builds, and will open up the doors wider than they are for cross-compatibility with other assets on the marketplace, which is still a topic that is being arranged and developed between myself and other marketplace developers.
I’ll be going more into detail on the exact use techniques and layouts in the coming weeks, but in the meantime if you have any questions or requests, please don’t hesitate to let me know. You can reach out to me on Twitter (@) or via email. (contactsmallheartstudios@gmail.com)
Hi. I like the idea of the modularity in particular. As an Orbit customer I’m using my own cloud system for performance gains but would want to keep Orbits sun/moon cycle.
Hey , just wondering if you’ve thought a little more about implementing the planetary setting we discussed some months ago. I’m not sure how viable it would be, but to have one side of a planet dark while the other is lit would be great.
