Posted August 02, 2022 by ashtorak
At the beginning of July I was chilling a bit, watching TwitchCon and afterwards a lot of different IRL streamers (I am slightly addicted...) and then the new Unity beta for 2022.2 dropped. Updating the project and checking everything out took quite a bit, so I decided to just add a few features and update the ship and booster models quickly to still get a July update out. However, importing more detailed blender models to Unity, setting them up properly and doing some adjustments here and there, that can take quite a bit of time also. I probably should look for somebody who can set it up nicely already in Unity. It just takes too much time.
Then I also thought, why throw away the old models? - just use the modding framework and make them interchangeable. It worked quite well for the raptor. However, the Starship model is much more complicated. So it took quite a bit of time to get this working properly and afterwards I didn't wanted to do the booster anymore :D
I am not sure how to proceed with the modding stuff. It's not very useful at the moment. But at least I got an idea how it could work. Need to sleep a bit more over it.
From the Unity beta features I only really used the water so far. It's pretty nice. Just a few things missing here and there. I played around with the volumetric fog. It looks good as long as you don't move the camera. If you do, it is only good for a few use cases. If you want to know more, check this forum thread
Other than that there are some smaller fixes and quality of life stuff in the editor which is also nice.
Ray tracing now needs to be enabled first via a dedicated toggle and then you can activate the effects like reflections and so on. It's a bit of an odd setup in the back as you cannot enable it directly in the HDRP asset. So I just added another asset for each quality level, one where ray tracing is enabled and one where it is off. Then it just switches out the HDRP assets. I noticed that it is always doing something when it is enabled, even when no effect is active. So FPS should be a bit better now with it completely disabled. But I haven't done any real bench marking. So it's mostly guess work.
Here is a list of all changes:
- booster and ship models and effects have been updated
- dispensable starlinks have been added
- changed water to new Unity beta system with waves, unfortunately it still has a few issues like rendering in front of clouds
- ship and raptor models are moddable now, this is more of a test to see how it works
- mod list is refreshed on opening menu or by pressing corresponding button (on build testing I noticed that it doesn't quite seem to work, you may have to restart the game to be able to load new models)
- added basic version of a floating interactable control panel (which can be switched on/off with 'Q' or put down by click on positioning mode in Misc menu)
- made rotation speed less sensitive
- flying speed can now be increased with sprint button
- updated key binding menu
- rocket additional settings: "Other Settings" are now also saved and loaded in the same way as the landing settings