Big City Trucking

As ever, progress this month was slower than expected (I choose to blame cheery optimism rather than a crippling lack of self-awareness), but I am stoked with how the city stations turned out. I'm giving up on my arbitrary "v5 before '25" deadline, but I shouldn't be TOO far off.

City Stations Complete!

The new city stations are considerably larger than the old ones, measuring 10 km across and presenting a whole new docking vibe. My goal was to make city arrivals feel a bit like pulling off a highway exit after a long roadtrip. NPC ship traffic will eventually drive this point home (scheduled for the eventual 'province updates'), but I'm really happy with how it feels for now.

New City Model

Approaching the Canada City arrivals gate

Navigating Canada City

I really underestimated how much modeling work there was to do here, and I'll admit that I phoned some of it in. The city interior is kind of a mess and I'm still working through some lighting & optimization issues, but I'm calling it good enough for now; it's a huge improvement over the old city stations and I think it was time well spent.

A Nicer Looking Solis System

I'm now getting to work on finishing the planetary makeovers that I started on in the last update. The major problem was that the planet generator that I implemented (c/o Sebastian Lague) doesn't support craters. Sebastian did end up revising his generator to do just that, but rather than trying to integrate that into my existing code I just said 'fuck it' and decided to model the cratered bodies by hand in Blender.

It's going well so far! I think? I only have 4 cratered bodies to make, including the Ceres-inspired dwarf planet that I'll be adding this month, tentatively named Svartalheim. Get it, DWARF planet? Anyway, Mirchick is almost done, check it out:

Mirchick model WIP

Mirchick Shader WIP

Coming Up Next

I feel like I've written the same damn thing under this heading for the past half a year, but at least the station exteriors are finally done. Anyway, the roadmap hasn't changed: finish these planets & moons, redo the station interiors, fix a bunch of bugs, release this bad boy.

Like I said, I'm not going to stress about finishing v5 this year. I can feel myself easing into a burnout phase but I've got a bunch of time off from work in December & January. The trick will be finding the right balance between getting shit done & chilling the fuck out. I'll do my best! See you on the other side.