Rocket Launch Surface to Orbit

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

I am wanting to create a simple space rocket simulator. Currently only thinking of close orbital flights. I’d love to give the player a 3rd player view of the rocket from ground all the way to orbit, just like Kerbal Space program does. I’m having trouble thinking of a good way to handle the transition from low to high altitude given that Unreal can only go so high up. I’m thinking scaling everything down would help, but you can only make the rocket so small before you run into lighting and camera issues. The other idea is to have the rocket stop moving and animate the sky box to make it look like the horizon is getting lower and more round, but that sounds really complicated.

Has anyone else tried something like this? What kind of hiccups did you run into that I should look out for? Finally, is UE4 just not suited to this kind of application, and do you know of something that would do this better? I thought to use UE4 because I am both familiar with it, and wanted near cinematic quality.

2

It’s actually kind of a big problem to solve, but not impossible. So when you say ‘simple,’ I’m worried that you might not want to deal with all the issues involved. But with that said, there is actually a lot of information out there about how KSP does it. Even though it’s a different engine, I’d probably follow their example.
Most of the programs and games I can think of that do anything involving orbital flight use a custom engine for just this reason. Orbiter, Space Engine (not to be confused with Space Engineers) to name a few. (And for anyone reading this who hasn’t looked into Space Engine: Do it. Absolutely amazing program.)