Space Graphics Toolkit & Planets

darkcoder i love ya man very exciting nd interesting stuff youre making and i gotta say the most useful toolkit on the asset store yet , and i was curious on that too shwa, the idea of moving around the planet is something i wanna achieve with your toolkit darkcoder, i got a starting point with your gassy asteroid thing i dont really need detail i just need the functionality of an object moving around the planet at a specific height that can be changed, and im curious if thats the thing youre gonna have for your V3 spaceship camera?or is it just moving around the solar system rather than the planet (like fixed distance nd bottom of spaceship facing the planet while the top away , ) sorry if i didnt make sense and thanks again

 

Screenshot from my game, a ship is on the surface of a planet that has a gravitational pull, my ship is sitting there

 

Yes, you can land on planets and move around. If you mean on foot, then I haven't written any kind of character controller that would allow it, but it's possible.

It depends what you mean by 'fully functioning demo scenes'. The package contains over 30 example scenes, where each scene shows off one or more features of the package. The WebPlayer demos you can see in the first post and on the asset store are just 3 of those scenes.

Yeah that's possible, but I don't imagine it's the best way to show off your portfolio. Keep in mind that there's currently no built-in way to spawn stuff like trees or rocks on the planet so the visual detail on your planet's surface will be limited without some programming.

If you look at the CameraMove component then you can see how I calculate the terrain height for planet surfaces. If you want to make something move around the planet surface then you'd have to do something similar to that. In the future I may write some kind of demo scene that has things on the planet surface.

The 'spaceship camera' is just an orbital camera that follows an object like a spaceship. It doesn't have anything to do with moving through space, or moving around a planet.

Looks good! Though I can't directly see the screenshot from these forums. Maybe you should reupload it to imgur or something

 

i do have a request, could you make the "Distance" orbit function include all 3 axis'? please

 

I'm not sure what you mean, and are you talking about the Camera Free Orbit component?

 

The SGT_SimpleOrbit

 

In the next version I've added the option to make the orbit elliptical, which should be enough. If you then want the orbit to follow some random axis then you can just rotate it.

 

Hi Darkcoder, I was wondering if you had a suggestion on how I can reduce the shimmering/sparkly effect I get when asteroids from your AsteroidRing appear too small/far away? I was poking around in the shader but wasn't sure how to make it show a minimum of one pixel and fade out from there.

Really loving this asset, thanks again!

 

This is a good idea, but fading the asteroids out would require alpha-blending which would result in incorrect depth sorting for all the asteroids (because it's all or nothing, I can't just apply this to some asteroids). I could try implementing a minimum size of each asteroid, but I'm not sure how god that would look from a distance.

 

Hello Darkcoder,

I was just wondering if the Nebulas are still planned for around version 3 ?

 

Yes

 

That's great ! Thanks.

 

I have a request for Version 3 or even 4, Trees on the planets. (i know it's alot to ask, sorry if it's to much)

 

You should look into how Orbiter stores and renders it huge (like 16000 by 8000 pixel) textures. It could allow for better textures and possibly fast rendering.

 

Hi,

Do you have any idea how i could use lens flares in your scenes (solar system for e.g) ?
Flares work fine with lights, but in your scene, the light source seems to be generated by the star (thrue your scripts) so the flares don't work.

Well if you have any idea how do this, that would be fine.


Thanks and again: good job !!

 

Jess3d, i always just add my own lightsource ontop of his and add my own flares.

 

Sorry for the late reply, I didn't get the message notification. I don't have any immediate plans to add trees or other things to the surface of planets. But Unity comes with a tree system, so you could just place them around the surface manually. In the future I may make some kind of component that allows you to automatically populate the surface with stuff, but I imagine it's a lot of work to make a system many people will be happy with.

I'm pretty sure they just split the surface texture up into a cube, then split each cube face into multiple textures. I could implement that, but it's tons of work and I don't imagine enough SGT users would even use it for it to be worth my time.

As Xsnip3rX says, you can still add a Unity light source to your scene and add a lens flare to that. Make sure your planet has a collider though, otherwise the lens flare will shine through it.

 

Thanks a lot for your answers, guys; i'll make it that way.

 

Just bumping this to keep it on top and alive so Darkcoder doesn't have to sort through tons of pages to update it with a new update... hint hint.

 

Real quick, sorry if you mentioned this question before but when the next release comes how will us paid customers be able to update to the next version?

 

You update it using the asset store where you bought it. Instead of saying "import", the button will say "update" when an update is available. Once it has downloaded the new version, the "update" button will turn into "import" button again. Clicking on "import" will allow you to import the new version to your project which will upgrade it. Hope this helps.

 

Thank you

 

Don't worry, I've bookmarked this thread!

Though these forum notifications seem to be pretty dodgy, as I only just got the one for this message :/




As for update news:

Version 2.5 will be out soon, I'm just adding some final touches to the documentation and making sure everything works.

I'll have to delay the video tutorials though because I'm not happy with the audio quality of the ones I recorded. However, my new mic setup just arrived, so after playing around with that I should be able to produce some fairly good ones

 

Hello Darkcoder i have a question towards future updates i am sure someone already ask this question but i need to make sure just in case.
If i will buy this asset now, will i ever have to pay additional fees to get better version ?. I notice you want to release soon version 2.5 and than maybe 3 and so on and so on. Will i ever have to pay extra ?

 

Thinker, Darkcoder has stated in one of the previous pages that if you buy now, you won't have to pay an inflated price next time there is an update, hope this helps.

DC, i cannot wait for these features man, im dying lol

 

this looks fantastic! Great work

 

@Thinker

Found it on page 10. Here was Darkcoder's reply:

 

Thanks for the help Alf

 

​

The latest version is now on the asset store! This isn't Version 3, so it doesn't contain tons of new features (they will come soon). But it does contain some bug fixes, some performance enhancements, some new components, and most importantly each component is now far more stable.

​

• Added Thruster component
• Added detail texture tiling option to the Planet component
• Added the ability to modify each star in starfield
• Removed star count limit in the Starfield component
• Removed asteroid count limit in Asteroid Ring component
• Improved Volumetric Probe ease of use
• Improved code quality and performance of most classes
• Fixed the star atmosphere bug that appears when changing the oblateness
• All documentation rewritten, again

​

Before upgrading, I highly suggest you back-up your projects.

Like the last update, this will probably break your scenes created with an earlier version of SGT. However, because of the stability enhancements to the components, and the new tool to clean your scenes up (Component/Space Graphics Toolkit/Cleanup), this should now be a much more painless process.

Please read the 'Read Me.pdf' for details on how to use the Cleanup tool.

​

Thruster component

The main new feature in 2.5 is the ability to create spaceship thrusters. These can be used to create a fully newtonian spaceship, or they can just be added to make it look better.

Also included is the Thruster Controller component, you can tell this component you want to turn right and it will automatically fire the thrusters necessary to turn in that direction.

I've also included an example 2D and 3D spaceship controller that can easily be modified to suit your games.


Starfield

This component has undergone a lot of changes: It now includes a texture packer, so you can add as many star textures of any size as you like; You now have control over the spawn probability, size, etc of all types of star; You can manually modify the settings for each individual star. How to use this is all covered in the starfield documentation.


Documentation

I rewrote the documentation again because I wasn't happy with it, but I think you'll agree that it's a lot better than before. It's now a component reference with lots of images. The tutorials that show you how to create various effects or scenes will no longer be in pdf form, instead they will be video tutorials and uploaded to my channel.

 

Not sure how I missed this before with the many searches I have done on "space", "scifi", etc. but I picked it up today for my latest project. Can't wait to give it a try.

 

Congrats on the v2.5 release, DC - your time and efforts are absolutely appreciated!

It's funny, the wifey and I are watching Star Trek - The Next Generation together on Netflix, and every time I see the star fields during warp speed, I think about you and SGT.

There was one scene where they were standing in front of some windows and the ship went into warp; the initial splash of white stars during acceleration and then finally the trademark stretched out, color shifted stars - I was like "where's my camera, where's my camera!"

If it wasn't for your toolkit, I'd still be trying to figure out how to make my planets look good, much less all the other great looking stuff!

Thanks again so much!


-Will

 

I just tried the three demo - this pack is really amazing !

Just a few random idea :
* It seems that the scene are not gamma corrected - if your have Unity Pro give it a go, it will help a lot to define the light-dark transition
* It would be great if you can merge Asteroid and Belt ring, after all they are the same in real life ! At a distance you slowly lod out the asteroid to blend to the ring texture. Not sure how it can look thought - maybe you need a lot more smaller asteroids to make it look right.
* On GPU Gems 3 there is a small section that talk about true impostor , you might want to have a look they are rendering 250 000 asteroid with this ... : http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch21.html

Keep up the good work !

 

Darkcoder, please do me a favor and make a 128x60 logo for this so i can slap it somewhere on my game

 

Thanks, I will create those warp effects one day!

I don't directly support linear lighting, because I don't use surface shaders. But you do have access to the lighting gradient, so you can manually tweak the lighting to be how you like. I'll probably improve on the way you set up the lighting in a future version.

I plan to add some kind of asteroid detail map feature to the ring component, so that when you approach it you can see dust and rocks moving around. But it won't really look the same as the existing asteroid rings.

Those asteroids are nice, but there's no way it'll run under shader model 2. Right now I'd like to keep SGT as cross platform compatible as possible. But maybe in the future I'll figure out some efficient way to replace the billboards with actual meshes you can interact with.

I don't really have much of a logo, but you could make one using the same font: http://www.pixelsagas.com/viewfont.php?fontid=96

 

The warp effect is at the top of my list personally. Also, I noticed that the thruster flares show through objects no matter if they are hidden from view or not (at least in the non-Pro edition.)

 

Its weird since when you type "space" in the asset store, Darkcoder's kit does not come up at all. All the other space kits do...

I don't know how the search is done, (if they use keywords or not), but if people that typed "space" would find it, I'm sure more people would buy it as not everyone navigates on these forums and then factor in the chances that the person actually sees the thread and its not that much.

 

Just create a Plane Collider, attach it to your game object, hide the renderer attached to the plane, outline the engine with those collider planes and voila, no flare through objects.

 

Hi Darkcoder,

I was wondering how you fixed the ExitGUIException error. I am also getting this and would greatly appreciate some help with this.

Cheers,

 

As Xsnip3rX says, you need to attach a collider to your objects. The way thruster flares work is they raycast to the camera, if the ray hits something then the flare fades away.

Which version of the Unity editor are you using? And can you list the steps required to reproduce this error?

 

I just updated to 2.5, and now I have a bunch of compiler errors. What to do? I'm using Unity 4.0.1.

Hmm, and there is no "Cleanup" item in the Components-->SpaceGraphics Toolkit menu.

Assets/SpaceGraphicsToolkit/Required/Scripts/Player/SGT_GasGiant_Properties.cs(62,27): error CS0102: The type `SGT_GasGiant' already contains a definition for `lightingTexture'

Assets/SpaceGraphicsToolkit/Required/Scripts/Player/SGT_Ring_Scattering.cs(10,23): error CS0102: The type `SGT_Ring' already contains a definition for `scatteringMie'

Assets/SpaceGraphicsToolkit/Required/Scripts/Player/SGT_Ring_Scattering.cs(15,21): error CS0102: The type `SGT_Ring' already contains a definition for `Scattering'

...etc.

 

Did you do a clean install? (i.e. delete the Space Graphics Toolkit directory before installing the latest version)

 

Hi,

Do you know how i can merge the starfield (script) with my own "skybox shader in the render settings" (picture with no transparency) ?
When i add the skybox, the starfield disappear; am i supposed to change the render queue ? decrease the radius to make the scripted stars closer to the camera ?

Thanks for your answer.

 

Changing the render queue should be all you need to do. By default the render queue is 1001, which means it gets drawn after things marked as 'background' (1000). Though your skybox shader really should use a render queue in that range.

 

Darkcoder thanks so much for making this toolkit, it has already inspired me to take the plunge with Unity and get started on the project I've been dreaming of for some time now. Being that I am a total noob with Unity, how are those tutorial videos coming? The documentation looks great and is to the point...if you have time in the future would you consider a small tutorial on how to actually create something like the sun in a scene? I've been messing around with it and the results aren't that great looking so far. I admit this is more my inexperience and not a reflection on your work, but some direction would be great!

 

I've been a little distracted by a side project, but I'll at least try and get some videos out before the weekend ends!

Can you give me details about the issues you're having with the stars? And if you can, reference pictures would be awesome.

 

That sounds awesome! But please, don't put anything on hold for little old me lol

I'm not at home right now to post any screen shots, but reflecting on what I did late last night I already think I know what my first issue is: I haven't unpacked the high res textures yet. Probably should have just stuck to asking for a tutorial haha. Thanks for your time, if you don't mind I would like to send you a PM in the future if any more bone head questions come up.

 

Sure, PM, or e-mail me at any time!

 

I love the update especially the spaceship thrusters. If I could request a video tutorial on that subject- thrusters and how to implement them on different spacecrafts. I tried doing a rocket- testing purposes(just to fly up) I followed the documentation and now figured it out until I fully start working on a full blown project. But right now its kinda hard to understand it completely.

 

Noted. I'll see if I can get this, and the sun video tutorial up later today.

 

I have a request, a few actually, but for your next release:

Thrusters that will let you roll your ship
Shields
and Laser Beams