I was inspired to keep pushing on the planetary stuff so I spend some time polishing up how we would go from foot, to ship, to orbit, to planet surface.

Starting to lose some steam on this for now. Might be a long hiatus now with work picking up.

Worked out the Overworld to Planet and how it should look. We got our ship moving with Newtonian physics.

Once we reach the planet, we can orbit around it. At any point, the player can leave the planet and go back to the overworld.

Started placing planets with volumes to see when we are in the region to enter orbit.

Began to wonder how it should feel in the overworld. Maybe the ship has Newtonian physics where it will proceed in the same direction until thrust is applied in another direction.

Decided to go back to top down. Camera and control are always concern when pressing forward on the pawn in Isometric view. Is forward actually top right or is it up in the center of the screen? Not something I need to worry about in normal top down.

Added debug lines for thrust, left stick input, control rotation.

Wrestling with camera. Started trying some isometric camera perspective.

Found a UE Marketplace ship that has an interior. Gonna mess with ship interior stuff soon.

Starting to figure out how I am going to go from ship to planet without blowing the budget on needless stuff. Trying to see if maybe scaling the player would be feasible. Trying some tricks.

Let’s see how big of a planet I can have. I started messing around with scale of planet and swapping the gravity. Trying to get a sense of how big this planet is if I were to run around it.

All sorts of funny business at the north and south poles. Not sure how to manage that.

Eureka! I forget how I specifically found a solution but it was a relatively simple one involving the up vector of the planet and building the control rotation using the right vector of the pawn to maintain the equator.

Math is hard. Wrapping my head around finding out the calculation to maintain the horizon so that up is always up.

Took a break to calculate how to find a point on a sphere and to find scalable random points.

Was able to get the gravity direction to switch on button press. Began adding debug arrows to help wrap my mind around the issue better.

Beginnings of gravity and planetary movement.

I began thinking it would be neat to have a game where you can navigate in an overworld with a ship and then land on a planet, however the planet would be fully traversable as a sphere.

Here I am utilizing an Unreal Engine plugin that manages gravity direction. I began making tweaks to the controls that would support swapping gravity direction based on planet location. I need to figure out how to always have the camera remain aligned with the equator. Spins uncontrollably. Handling calculations in C++.

Minor break. Work started creeping up.

An interesting issue I knew I would have to solve at some point was how to see through objects while inside. I started making some shader work to be able to cut a hole via a mask transparency.

Now that I can get from on foot and onto the ship, I am thinking I want to see how to make that transition seamless.

Started expanding on the interaction interface to include animation support for sitting in the ship and going to an overworld view.

Here’s a prototype of sitting in the captain’s chair and launching the ship. Threw together a quick block out of a ship as aspirational for larger vessels.

More iteration on the interaction interface. More functionality. UMG support. Trying to make more systemic UI interfaces along with interaction interfaces. Also added some door unlock/lock mechanism.

Began making interaction interfaces to open up doors, enter the ship, land at a port and other camera volume setup.

Started wanting to develop some of the interior look and feel. Started having some ambitions to make this some kind of survival game. Began stubbing in some kind of stats you might expect. Added attributes, Gameplay Tags and the Gameplay Ability System.

Wanted the camera to feel like it follows the player appropriately. Created a series of volumes and splines that calculate the player location inside and move the camera along the spline. Also as the player enters new volumes, set the camera to the new camera.

Medium hiatus. Holidays and start of Q1 is always a pain for me and personal work. What is time? Did we all decide we are done with Covid? Starting to feel normal again.

Anyway, started thinking about procedural content generation.

I began making a hex grid, like a fool. In retrospect, a normal square grid would have saved me the pain of remembering my high school geometry class I barely passed and using that info for 3D math. It was a good challenge and I got it to work. Each hex represents a space sector. The grid renders X number of spaces away from the player and loads and unloads the tiles accordingly.

At this point I began to think about world scale limits in Unreal. Starting to think this might be a roadblock. I’ll just keep messing around.

Thinking about potential features and had interest in just prototyping UI. I believe I was playing RE2 Remake and had some thoughts about inventories. I wanted to see how to build a backpack inventory similar to Diablo 2 where the player can play Tetris with their pieces.

Created in UMG. Players can flip objects sideways to maximize long pieces in their inventory.

Thinking about old school TMNT overworld. What if there was a top down vehicle game in space where you can land on stations and planets?

Prototyped what landing and going to overworld could look and feel like.

Moved away from multiplayer.

Started changing the camera perspective to top down and using twin stick controls where the body heading can face one direction and the lower body can animate accordingly in the appropriate direction.

The left and right stick inputs are being registered in C++ and calculated to track the player heading and desired movement direction. Those values are being passed to the animation blueprint to drive the blendspaces on the pawn.

Experimenting with Multiplayer replication and synchronization, managing animation state machines on the character using camera heading, blendspaces and turn in place animations.

Whenever the player camera turn passes a threshold, it plays the turn animation on both clients. IT also follows the head of the pawn using aim offsets.