It has been quite a while since my last real update. I spend a lot of work on improving the code. Everything is more organized and easier to work with. Unfortunately it is not possible to show that in a video so I created a few new assets that are visible. Here is the video:
As you can see I experimented with a shader for planets. It is not perfect yet but I am quite happy with what I got so far. It is not visible in the video because the planets are rotating too slowly but the lights on the planets switch on/off when the terminator is moving across them.
After adding the planets I realized that I would need some kind of indication of movement in front of the camera since the planets are so huge and so far away that it seemed that the ship was not moving at all. So I added these little dust cloud particles that move past the camera relative the the controlled ships velocity. It might be hard to see in the compressed video but creates a much better illusion of movement.
The skybox is bought on the marketplace.
The ship engines also got a particle effect. That one is really basic so far and only a placeholder until I figure out how to make something more pretty.
There are also some obvious changes to the HUD. The small ‘Target HUD’ will be used for quick interaction with objects while the ‘Side HUD’ will be used mainly for providing information to the player. Unfortunately I was not able to make the HUD on the side interactive. It is a Widget Component attached to the camera but it ignores all input so far. However, since that feature is still experimental I decided not to put too much effort into that right now and focus on other things. If someone has an idea why it is not accepting input I would be grateful.
I am not exactly sure what will be done next but I plan to test a few gameplay ideas and see how they work, and -as always- fix bugs.