Space Graphics Toolkit & Planets

i'm getting the following error when in playmode
Shader error in 'Space Graphics Toolkit/Planet': Fragment program 'Frag': Unrecognized sampler 'sampler_maintex' - does not match any texture and is not a recognized inline name (should contain filter and wrap modes).
at line 7555 (on d3d11)

 

Alright, I got it figured out. It was because of a lack of update of Position data (instead using transform.position) from within Mirror which I'm using for multiplayer. When a player prefab is spawned (in this case a ship model) it attaches the needed information, but then moves the transform.position to the spawn location within the same frame, causing the Position to not be updated correctly. This combined with an SgtFloatingOrbit moving the planet while in flight caused it to have some issues.

 

This will be fixed in the next version coming out tomorrow.

 

Another odd behavior that I found with the FloatingFollow combined with FloatingOrbit. The scenario is that I have a spaceship that can "warp" between planets, all of which have real orbits (using FloatingOrbit) around a parent star. When I warp to them, everything is working fine now, except for the fact that the planet will continuously move either away from or toward the player ship (depending on direction of incoming travel). No worries, you have a FloatingFollow setup for this kind of purpose, I figure.

So I do the following:
Create a new class called FloatingSphereOfInfluence that is a position and radius. When you enter or leave the sphere of influence it can call various callbacks.
When the ship warps to within the sphere of influence, set the target and activate the FloatingFollow component on the ship, with the target set to the planet just warped to

The problem is two-fold: If I don't set a LocalPosition, it snaps the ship to the center of the planet (inside the planet). When I set it so that that doesn't happen, the ship can no longer move at all - every frame it attempts to move through normal means, it is snapped back to that local position.

So my question is, how would I use FloatingFollow to allow the ship to sit in "orbit" (not really orbiting - I don't want to go down that road) above a planet that is on it's own FloatingOrbit trajectory, while still allowing the ship to fly around within the space around said planet? I hope I'm making sense here....

EDIT: To add to this, I've tried both implementing my own kind of follow (check last position of planet frame to frame an move ship by delta) to no real avail, as well as updating the target-position of the follow component after physics update for ship controller. Neither one produces good results. Wondering if other people have had similar experiences/insights

 

The SgtFloatingFollow component is designed to allow you to attach objects together, kind of like the Transform hierarchy.

This isn't designed for 'locking' an object into orbit around a planet, because it doesn't perform any checks to see if the object has moved and it therefore doesn't update the follow position to compensate.

The 'correct' approach is to give your objects the appropriate velocity to orbit your planet at the warp point, like in real life. Alternatively you can modify your 'FloatingSphereOfInfluence' component so it calculates the spaceship's planet-relative position for the previous and current frame, and then shift its SgtFloatingObject's Position by the delta of this position, which will keep it in a fixed orbit.

 

Hello! It might be that I’ve got brain fog, but I can’t find an example in SGT for a very distant planet. I want one that has no apparent motion relative to the backdrop when I fly my racecourse, but I don’t just want a skybox. I want a planet with animated clouds and scattering. And I want minimal performance impact. I tried using out-of-the-box planets (including earth-sized) but they slid by when I moved, or (in the case of the Earth) added a huge unnecessary hit to the CPU/GPU. Any hints as to how I might do this? I would like to explore flight closer to (or even dipping into) planetary atmospheres later, but not just yet. Thanks!

 

The easiest solution is to make a new GameObject with the CwFollow component with the Rotate setting disabled. Then add background GameObjects to this like a planet. You can then position and rotate it as desired, and it will remain locked there and look distant.

You can also do similar using multiple cameras, or if you increase your camera range a lot you could actually place planets very far away so they are actually distant.

 

I like both ideas. The former for when the planet(s) need to be far away, and the latter when I just might have a race *to* the planet. thanks!

 

Hey I checked the most recent updates (btw: thank you for constantly updating and improving this great asset!) and saw this:
4.0.5
...
Fixed SgtTerrainCollider vertex alignment and distribution to match visual mesh.
...

Did you finally manage to get the colliders closer to the visual mesh? However when checking it out, there are still gaps between the visual mesh and the colliders, so the player character will either float above the terrain or sink into it.

I remember the very first version of the terrain (before you switched to burst) didn't have this problem, the colliders vertices were exactly the same as the visual mesh vertices.

 

Hi @Darkcoder . Is there a way to use the "Starfield Infinite (Stretch)" feature when the SgtFloatingCamera component is not attached to the Camera, but to another gameobject that the camera follows?

My setup requires the SgtFloatingCamera to be attached to the Spaceship prefab, and the Camera follows it using a CwFollow component.

 

Hiya,

The star's material in 01 Star Shader seems to lose its brightness value in URP 2021.2+ when switched from Forward to Deferred.

 

I don't notice any difference in the Terrestrial Planet demo scene. If you increase the SgtTerrainCollider Resolution to 256 to match the visual mesh, then every vertex lines up:



If you use the default 64 value then they still line up, just with every 4th vertex in the visual mesh.

For the Earth Sized Planet demo scene there's a discrepancy purely due to the floating point precision on such a large planet, but there's not much that can be done there without moving the collider GameObjects to not be parented to the planet.

The Stretch feature is based on the SgtCamera component's velocity tracking. You can set the starfield's StretchScale to 0 to ignore this, and set your own StretchVector based on anything you like.

Thanks, I can replicate the issue. I'll see if I can fix it for the next version.

 

I found a little mistake in the Solar System Pack:
Mercury has no atmosphere but in the Mercury scene it has one attached to it

 

Bug report
I found a bug in the "Earth" example scene of the additional "Solar System" pack.
When I move further away of the planet, then the atmosphere is glitching and on the planets shadow side there is a weird reflection and an brighter area.
This is on some Android devices and maybe on the Oculus Quest 2.

 

I added the atmosphere to make the edge smooth, even without anti-aliasing. But yeah it would be more realistic without!

How are you moving the camera? If I run the Earth scene with the provided SgtCameraMove component then it works as expected.

It's possible your movement script needs to have a different Script Execution Order. Or maybe you're using a different rendering pipeline?

The reflection looks like the normal map is broken. Can you let me know the exact version of Unity, SGT, render pipeline, and Android device you get this issue with?

 

Yes, I have a custom movement script for the camera. I got it from a different Forum:

Code (CSharp):

1. using System.Collections;
2. using System.Collections.Generic;
3. using UnityEngine;
4. public class MobilemaxCamera : MonoBehaviour {
5.     public Transform target;
6.     public Vector3 targetOffset;
7.     public float distance = 5.0f;
8.     public float maxDistance = 20;
9.     public float minDistance = .6f;
10.     public float xSpeed = 5.0f;
11.     public float ySpeed = 5.0f;
12.     public int yMinLimit = -80;
13.     public int yMaxLimit = 80;
14.     public float zoomRate = 10.0f;
15.     public float panSpeed = 0.3f;
16.     public float zoomDampening = 5.0f;
17.     private float xDeg = 0.0f;
18.     private float yDeg = 0.0f;
19.     private float currentDistance;
20.     private float desiredDistance;
21.     private Quaternion currentRotation;
22.     private Quaternion desiredRotation;
23.     private Quaternion rotation;
24.     private Vector3 position;
25.     private Vector3 FirstPosition;
26.     private Vector3 SecondPosition;
27.     private Vector3 delta;
28.     private Vector3 lastOffset;
29.     private Vector3 lastOffsettemp;
30.     //private Vector3 CameraPosition;
31.     //private Vector3 Targetposition;
32.     //private Vector3 MoveDistance;
33.     void Start() { Init(); }
34.     void OnEnable() { Init(); }
35.     public void Init()
36.     {
37.         //If there is no target, create a temporary target at 'distance' from the cameras current viewpoint
38.         if (!target)
39.         {
40.             GameObject go = new GameObject("Cam Target");
41.             go.transform.position = transform.position + (transform.forward * distance);
42.             target = go.transform;
43.         }
44.         distance = Vector3.Distance(transform.position, target.position);
45.         currentDistance = distance;
46.         desiredDistance = distance;
47.         //be sure to grab the current rotations as starting points.
48.         position = transform.position;
49.         rotation = transform.rotation;
50.         currentRotation = transform.rotation;
51.         desiredRotation = transform.rotation;
52.         xDeg = Vector3.Angle(Vector3.right, transform.right);
53.         yDeg = Vector3.Angle(Vector3.up, transform.up);
54.     }
55.     /*
56.       * Camera logic on LateUpdate to only update after all character movement logic has been handled.
57.       */
58.     void LateUpdate()
59.     {
60.         // If Control and Alt and Middle button? ZOOM!
61.         if (Input.touchCount==2)
62.         {
63.             Touch touchZero = Input.GetTouch (0);
64.             Touch touchOne = Input.GetTouch (1);
65.             Vector2 touchZeroPreviousPosition = touchZero.position - touchZero.deltaPosition;
66.             Vector2 touchOnePreviousPosition = touchOne.position - touchOne.deltaPosition;
67.             float prevTouchDeltaMag = (touchZeroPreviousPosition - touchOnePreviousPosition).magnitude;
68.             float TouchDeltaMag = (touchZero.position - touchOne.position).magnitude;
69.             float deltaMagDiff = prevTouchDeltaMag - TouchDeltaMag;
70.             desiredDistance += deltaMagDiff * Time.deltaTime * zoomRate * 0.0025f * Mathf.Abs(desiredDistance);
71.         }
72.         // If middle mouse and left alt are selected? ORBIT
73.         if (Input.touchCount==1 && Input.GetTouch(0).phase == TouchPhase.Moved)
74.         {
75.             Vector2 touchposition = Input.GetTouch(0).deltaPosition;
76.             xDeg += touchposition.x * xSpeed * 0.002f;
77.             yDeg -= touchposition.y * ySpeed * 0.002f;
78.             yDeg = ClampAngle(yDeg, yMinLimit, yMaxLimit);
79.         }
80.         desiredRotation = Quaternion.Euler(yDeg, xDeg, 0);
81.         currentRotation = transform.rotation;
82.         rotation = Quaternion.Lerp(currentRotation, desiredRotation, Time.deltaTime * zoomDampening);
83.         transform.rotation = rotation;
84.         if (Input.GetMouseButtonDown (1))
85.         {
86.             FirstPosition = Input.mousePosition;
87.             lastOffset = targetOffset;
88.         }
89.         if (Input.GetMouseButton (1))
90.         {
91.             SecondPosition = Input.mousePosition;
92.             delta = SecondPosition - FirstPosition;
93.             targetOffset = lastOffset + transform.right * delta.x*0.003f + transform.up * delta.y*0.003f;
94.         }
95.         ////////Orbit Position
96.         // affect the desired Zoom distance if we roll the scrollwheel
97.         desiredDistance = Mathf.Clamp(desiredDistance, minDistance, maxDistance);
98.         currentDistance = Mathf.Lerp(currentDistance, desiredDistance, Time.deltaTime * zoomDampening);
99.         position = target.position - (rotation * Vector3.forward * currentDistance );
100.         position = position - targetOffset;
101.         transform.position = position;
102.     }
103.     private static float ClampAngle(float angle, float min, float max)
104.     {
105.         if (angle < -360)
106.             angle += 360;
107.         if (angle > 360)
108.             angle -= 360;
109.         return Mathf.Clamp(angle, min, max);
110.     }
111. }

Unity Version: 2021.3.5f1
SGT Version: 4.0.8
Android Device: Motorola Moto Edge 20
Render Pipeline: built-in renderer

 

You tried modifying the Script Execution Order of it as I mentioned? You can try 2000 or something.

 

Hi @Darkcoder I have a Unity 2020.3 project where I'm using SGT v3.9.8. I recently purchased Space Graphics Planets and would like to add it to my current project. Are there any compatibility issues with me adding Space Graphics Planets v4.0.8 to a project with SGT v3.9.8?

 

Version 4 modified many things, so it will likely break your project until you update everything. You can always back up your project, install it, and see what happens.

 

How can i fix the detail? the ocean detail works with a very big tiling, but of a terrain planet detail not.

 

Thank you for the feedback. I'll just import the materials I need from SGP as that covers most of what I need. Although, I look forward to my next project when I use the latest version of SGT! I like the atmospheric effect improvements and a lot of the other modifications you've made.

 

Hi @Darkcoder I'm trying to use either SgtFloatingRing or SgtFloatingOrbit to spawn asteroids around an object. How can I set the radius of the Ring/Orbit?
From what I understand, Range, Radius Min and Radius Max are all related to the distance to the Camera, not to the center of the Ring/Orbit

 

You need to use the baked tiling settings in the P3dTerrainPlanet component. You're also using the wrong shader. Terrain planet requires you to use the Terrain planet shader, not the Planet shader. See the terrain examples.

The SgtFloatingOrbit component's Radius setting is the orbit radius. You can hover over the settings to view a tooltip.

 

I tried to change the Script Execution Order but nothing works. I managed to find where the problem is but I still don't know how to fix it. Maybe you can fix it and make an update?

The problem for the weird reflections is caused by the Earth's material and if you deactivate the water setting it doesn't look so good anymore but the weird reflections are gone.

The problem with the glitching atomsphere is caused by the "SGT Atmosphere DepthTex" Script and if you change the Horizon color the glitching color changes too.

I hope this helps.

 

So I did a search and couldn't find anything... does anyone have a script and effects for re-entry with SGT to planets?

If someone has something that works I would be willing to pay a small fee just so I don't need to make it lols... busy with other things atm.

 

@Darkcoder Can you explain exactly what the Terrain Object does. I can't seem to find any examples. I replicated Earth via heightmaps, etc and I am wanting to be able to try and get finer details in there for the surface if I can wasn't sure what that does exactly based on the web docs and couldn't seem to find an example of it either. Also do you have any suggestions for the system to draw roads, etc on teh surfaces, or mass place things like trees, etc. ( I know the spawner can do some of this but figured their might be a more performant way, perhaps another details texture, etc for a more granular level at the human sized surface level.

 

Alright, I'll add it to my to-do list to check. You can also try a negative script execution order.

Looks like I forgot to make a tutorial scene for that. The "Planet Surfing" demo scene uses it though.

Basically, it glues the current GameObject to the surface of the nearest SgtTerrainPlanet.

The spawner is only built-in way to spawn objects on the surface. Spawning more complex systems like roads or forests would require a custom component.

 

Hey, my character is moving in the Idle position because of planet rotation. When the planet rotates around the sun and around itself player is not moving with it, so in fact, the player stays idle but the planet moves and that's why it seems like the player moves along the planet's surface. This issue disappears when I turn off the RigidBody. Could anyone help please to fix it?

 

I assume your planet is quite small, so you would have to make a component that adds velocity to your player based on the movement and rotation of the planet (e.g. using InverseTransformPoint and TransformPoint). In real life the Earth is so big and this acceleration is so miniscule that you can't feel it relative to gravity, though it does exist but you're on the ground and friction does a good job of keeping you still.

It sounds like you set the mass of your planet too high if it's smashing into it.

A fully featured character controller is an immense amount of work implement, whereas adding the ability to change the 'up' direction of an existing character controller should be easy, therefore it makes no sense for me to make a system like this. Maybe some system out there already has this feature? I haven't looked into it though so I don't know.

 

@Darkcoder ^^ thanks for above I actually removed my post as I didn't really need a reply anymore but I guess I did it just as your answer was posted...

I am trying to see if I can use Vegetation Studio pro to put details on the planets, is there a way to expose the generated terrain chunks so I can tell vegetation studio to use the player sized chunks?

 

No. SGT terrains are SgtTerrain, not Unity's built-in terrain system, therefore there is no cross compatibility with any system like this.

 

Okay thanks, again if you decide its worth your time to expand on this real world terrain concept with more details, etc. Since your system is very custom allowing users a plugin to detail the terrains in greater details would likely be much appreciated.

I will happily pay more to see this process completed at some point. Again wouldn't even have to be part of the main SGT package I think myself and others would gladly pay for addon packs that enhance the capabilities of the asset further. However this way you aren't having to just expend efforts for no additional compensations.

 

I have plans to create a new terrain asset with more features, but it's a massive undertaking and I'm currently very busy so we'll see.

 

@Darkcoder

Is it possible to bake the SGTStarfieldModel (or similar generative models) similar to the dropdown of starfield?

I'm trying to optimise a transition scene that has different models being enabled here and there. And the build mesh function is dropping some frames.

I've been trying to hack it myself a bit, but I can't seem to replace the generated model, and can't find where it hinders me from doing so

 

Sorry for the late reply.

I've experimented with this before and the main issue is that the generated meshes use up quite a lot of memory, and since each scene typically has unique starfields this can quickly end up being too much to not be so useful. The starfield components also have the generation settings built in, so it may not make sense to have some sort of mesh setting to bypass this. So overall I don't think it's a feature worth having.

The generated starfield mesh is stored in the SgtStarfield component's 'mesh' setting, so you can always modify the code to save this mesh to an asset, and then make a new component based on this that overrides LateUpdate to set your loaded mesh rather than generate it.

 

Is there a way to add the heights (like Mountains) to the Earth from the Solar System Pack?

 

The planets in the Solar System Pack are made using the SgtPlanet component, which allows you to set a heightmap to displace the vertices.

You could also replace SgtPlanet with SgtTerrainPlanet (Terrain feature), which allows you to make higher resolution mountains like seen in the Earth Sized Planet scene and similar, but the setup is more complex (see the Terrain folder's tutorial demo scenes).

 

Why are the Flowers, but now the Trees spawning? The Area are the same, but the Treshold of the Trees is set to 0.8. For Flowers, its 0.7.

 

Too hard to say what's happening with such little information. If you've set terrain areas then the Threshold setting adjusts the weight/opacity of each area. For example, if the weight of one specific area on your planet is 0.5, then setting Threshold to 0.5 means the weight will become 0.0, and thus nothing will spawn. When the weight is 0.75, then the weight will become 0.5 (0.75 if half way between 0.5..1.0).

Keep in mind this requires your area colors to smoothly blend into each other. If you just have solid red next to solid green, then the actual transition area where the Threshold setting will have effect will be one pixel/texel.

 

@Darkcoder

So I am still trying to work out a player controller for walking about the planet but I was using the code example from the planet surfacing demo IE (SGT Terrain Object) script.. However I am trying to figure out how can I keep the player upright with the planet, but also move them about without the issue that you can even see in the demo where the ship will randomly change directions. It should just keep heading in a specific direction unless I/the player tell it to rotation left/right, etc.

Any help/advice you can offer on this would be appreciated.

Or anyone else that has advice is always welcome as well. Don't mean to bug the author with all my questions but didn't see much advice on teh forum for it. Seems like not alot of peeps use the asset to walk on the planets yet.

 

Hello Darkcoder,

It's a very cool asset.

Is there an easy way to add city night lights to the SGT_Planet as seen in some of the examples in the attached link?
https://novashade.itch.io/nextgen-planets

Also is there an easy way to add tiny moving lights for a space lanes effect to the SGT_Planet?
Thanks!

 

@Quasari You can do that this way.. Just edit the material for the planet and add in your night texture.

 

@Darkcoder

Is there a way to make the Planet Terrain looks in a Low Poly design?

 

Play around with the smallest triangle size and between that and your material settings, etc you should be able to get something what your looking for.

 

So in the interest of helping others out... here is a character controller script that you can use with SGT that will let you walk about the planets surface.

I tried to make it as vanilla as possible.

 

Got another glitch only on Android devices...

I have an SGT Terrain Planet in my scene and if I get close enough and look to the horizon the meshes get invisible or something like that.

Is there any fix for this?

Using Unity 2022.1.11f1, SGT 4.0.8, Motorola Edge 20 (Android 12)

 

And with Point Light it's getting even worse

 

Thanks for the quick reply. Is there an easy way to mask the night texture with the SGT water so that the texture doesn't show on top of the water?

 

If it were me I would just edit the texture so the lights aren't where the water is.

 

Hi, I am not sure why you use this forum, which is hard to search as support? Maybe discord would work better? Anyway, got the asset, looks good. However I have a problem and few observations.

1. I have a floating massive galaxy with 4 star, each one floating object, target, has floating orbit, floating lod. (based on universe example 16). So far so good i can select stars and teleport, but I cannot add billboards to highlight stars that user can travel too, or have all Pins displayed at the same time.
2. I have prefab solar system (used the one from example) which should load when i fly near and it does. However the system does not work: Most of the times planets are not rendered, so I had to use either unrealistic distances like 4000km, or floating scaler.
3. Planets do not spin around the sun. I tried all combos, but it seems even if they say their floating orbit parent is sun, sometimes they end up spinning around the camera. this is why i cannot approach camera. If i leave field empty they select themselves to spin around.
4. Spawning objects to my star puts them inside the star object, and floating objects of the planet cannot be parented by another floating object. Even if I create floating root object for spawning purpose this is ignored.
5. When searching documentation I have discovered things like: Removed SgtFloatingLod component. in 3.7.0. The samples and my code still use all those 'removed' items in 4.0.8