This month was a bit of a trial, but it all came together in the end. There's still a lot of work to do on this front, but I'm happy with the progress and I'm calling it good enough for now. I think I'll just commit to spending a month or so with each update from now on working on graphics.
Procedural Planets Drama
Integrating the procedural planets into the main game did not go smoothly.
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| I have a system. 'x' means 'done', but it also means 'fuck it I give up'. |
This disaster was due in part to me not understanding what the fuck a rendering pipeline is, but was mostly caused by my dumb ass panicking when everything broke. I changed a bunch of my own code as well as settings balls deep in esoteric Unity menus without backing things up first and I just ended up spending a day completely borking everything. I finally decided that it was easier to take the loss and revert to a previous version. My version control discipline isn't great but it's not entirely non-existent, so it ended up setting me back by like a week.
I thought about moving on and just sticking with the old planet models for now, but you don't spend years slaving away at a game that no one is ever going to buy without being a stubborn son of a bitch. So I took another shot at it, and I'm glad I did. Check it out:
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| Tyra's new groove |
Same shitty old clouds, and I'd like to add some atmospheric effects eventually, but I think the planet itself is a huge improvement. More importantly, the procedural planet generator is working (with a few bugs, admittedly) in the game, so I spent some time replacing a couple of other planets & moons as well. Happy exploring! I'll try to get to the rest in the next version.
Ship Interior Complete
The interior is still very much a work in progress, but it's finally starting to feel a bit more space trucky. I sealed off the engine room for now with non-functioning doors labeled 'Cargo Hold', pretty sneaky yeah?
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| Lower Deck Hallway |
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| Cockpit |
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| Midship |
Good enough for now! Luckily, as I mentioned last month, I had moved on to planet generation before spending the time to tediously place these new interior art assets, so that saved me a lot of re-do work when I had to revert the project.
Post Processing Effects
I also spent some more time dinking around with post processing. Applying effects selectively to different cameras turns out to be pretty problematic in Unity URP, and Black Road Sky uses a bunch of different cameras to create the illusion of scale, so I wasn't able to do a lot of the things that I wanted to.
I ended up applying effects only to the main 1st person camera. The result is subtle, but generally makes things look a bit nicer. I think? Either that or maybe worse? I can't tell. Whatever. I'm just not a graphics dude, you know?
Coming Up Next
I've got a little bit of cleanup work to do with this graphics nonsense, but the coming month will be focused on bug fixing and optimizations as I get ready to think about possibly maybe finally releasing this version someday soonish.
