Cats, Computers and Chase View

Progress has been slow this past month due to a handful of IRL things. I adopted a couple of new cats who don't seem particularly interested in my productivity, and I upgraded to a new PC, which is cool, but it took forever to get my development environment set back up. It's still not working quite how I want it to, but it's good enough to get back to work. This upgrade has been kind of a pain in the ass, but the Unity project for Black Road Sky now loads in less than 30 seconds instead of the 10 to 15 minutes that it used to take. So that's nice. Anyway, throw in a couple of weekends spent out of town, and there just wasn't much time left over for development.

When I did finally sit down to get working on the new ship interior, I made a sad discovery: I wasn't actually done with the new ship exterior. Now, if you're not a computer science whiz like me then you may not be able to spot the difference, but:

here's what the ship was looking like before docking:

and after docking:

That's right, the docked ship that you see from 1st person view uses a different model than the ship you see in chase view. In fact, they're completely different entities in the game. Your reaction to this fact probably lies somewhere on a continuum from "That's weird" to "That's stupid", and you're not wrong.

In order for Black Road Sky to work, I need to make wildly different scales play nicely together. This is non-trivial due mostly to what nerds call floating point precision, but basically you can't make those scales work together without employing some clever tricks. I'm not calling myself clever here, by the way, I didn't come up with any of this on my own, but those two ships, the docked one and the chase view one, essentially exist in different dimensions. They're linked only by the background simulation and the human mind's tendency to seek continuity. In order to maintain that illusion of continuity, and to support ship customization, I needed to make the chase view model update itself based on the current 1st person model. As is almost always the case, this was easier said than done, but behold, it has been done:

YAS CHONK

This completely broke some major systems, most notably the ability to dock the ship, but I eventually got everything working again. I think. So it is with mixed feelings and an annoyed sigh that I now declare the navigationally useless chase view to be in working order.

With all of that out of the way, I've finally started blocking out the new interior layout, but it's not much to look at just yet. It's going to include space for an airlock, engine room, consumable tanks, hardware storage area, quarters (not sure if that'll really end up being a thing) and of course the cockpit. If all goes well, I'll have a grand tour prepared for you by next month. Stay tuned & fly safe!