Hello all! Wanted to share one of my current projects with everyone here and get any feed back you might have! So let me know what you think!
One of the issues I am struggling with right now is planet sizes. I would like to make the planets larger, but I cannot find a suitable vector graphics rendering system for unity right now that is up to date. And without Vector graphics the planets have to be massive image files to have clean surface lines when zoomed in looking at your spaceship on the surface.
ASTEROID INITIATIVE
Asteroid Initiative Introduction-
This is a game primarily about exploring space and building rockets, however with the addition of a threat/lose condition. The premise for the game is that you are a space agency that has been put into action to help defend your planet against asteroids headed to collide with your planet. So you must build rockets to stop the asteroids by various methods. Exploding them, harpooning them and dragging them to a new orbit, perhaps if you are skilled enough and attach enough rockets to an asteroid you could even land it on your planet to extract it’s resources!
While you are not defending the planet from the immediate threat you can explore the solar system and start colonies on other planets, or perhaps even discover what has caused so many asteroids to be directed towards your home planet, aliens? a new planet? find out! Just ensure you are keeping the asteroids from wiping out your planets population, if you have no people left then your space agency fails, you can also fail if the people of your planet lose faith in your ability, or become so comfortable that they stop believing there is a threat.
Latest Version P0.23
Download Link
!!! Be aware this is a prototype version of the game, the user interface is only about 15% complete, parts are not balanced in anyway, planetary gravity and atmospheric settings are all very much not final. Expect bugs, and expect a very incomplete game !!!
The building system is a simple node based system.
Parts can be attached to any free node of the same color, provided they do not collide into other parts.
If the massive image sizes are effecting performance, you could always have separate detail levels (half max resolution, quarter max resolution) that get swapped when your nowhere near the zoom level to notice the swap. That might help when lots of planets are in view you know.
It is not a performance issue really, all though it could be. The issue is load times, and file size. I have 3 planets right now, the sun and gas giant do not count because you cannot get close enough to need fine detail. But with just my 3 planets the project size is around 1.5G. Load times are acceptable, but if I am ever going to put this on mobile than I am going to have a lot of issues.
Also you can only ever have one planet in view at a time. So when not on screen they are just not rendered.
-Time acceleration/deceleration. (auto slows down when nearing planet/moon/star)
-Docking
-Fuel flow between tanks
-Control of parts via clicking on them in flight (applies to certain parts)
-Fuel quantity indicators on tanks
New Parts:
-Crew Transfer Capsule MKI (no crew yet) (has built in docking port)
-Docking ports
-Service Orbital Engine
-Medium to Small angled Adapter.
Additional:
-Flights already in motion for you to select and check out new features faster.
-Engine balancing. (fixed a bug that kept engine flame from properly heating things that they touched)
-Fire individual decouplers by left clicking them. (bug: at high velocities clicking is inaccurate and you may need to click many times quickly)
-Undock by right clicking them (same bug as above)
-Left click command modules to switch to controlling that vehicle (same bug as above)
-Left click engines to turn on/off (same bug as above)
-Launch Pad fixes (issues with parts blocking launch pad, for now the best way to clear pad is make a rocket with a bomb and set it off on the pad hit key “B”)
-Add distance indicator to target vector.
-Add distance indicator to asteroid vector.
-Add auditory indicator when entering the proximity of a planet/moon.
-Fix issue with clicking parts when traveling at high velocity.
Parts:
-Fuel Hoses
-Harpoon Launcher
-Grappler
-Booster Rockets
-Small diameter Fuel Tanks
-New Planet/Moon (request what you would like to see next!)
I’m not questioning your knowledge or development prowess, or quality of your game at this stage of development (v0.21) just wondering what could be taking up so much space (file size) and causing long load times?
Does the profiler provide information on this?
Not a slight on your game, but it doesn’t look very visually complex at this stage. Are your texture resolutions maxed out and poly counts for all objects overly detailed?
Would like to see a screen shot of the mesh detail in Unity.
On a side note - I saw another thread discussing vector graphics recently. Could be helpful. There are some links and info in there.
I honestly am not sure why it is happening, but for the majority of the images I add to the project (PNGs) I get a very large metadata folder size increase. This may be due to many of the images not being compressible, but the actual metadata still exceeds the size of the files themselves.
The game uncompressed sets around 1.5GB and then zipped is reduced to 48MB. Additionally my assets folder is 266MB and my metadata data folder is 1.74GB
I don’t have meshes, objects are all Sprites. Collisions are all with primitives.
And please criticism is fine so long as it helps me! I am at a loss here as to why I have such a large project size.
Vector graphics are certainly something I will be implementing though, I am waiting on this asset - http://svgimporter.com/
I actually used Adobe illustrator to make the Sprites, and I used gradients for shading to make them look like they had volume. Glad you liked them though!
I am going to be honest I did not even know about that Profiler tool until you mentioned it. Using it I was able to see a big bottle neck and just improved performance by about 300% on my game… Thanks!
It was unrelated to my aforementioned issues, but still every bit helps!
Wow! It has been a busy last few weeks, but I am glad to get you all the latest version with lots of bug fixes, improvements and additional features!!!
Features:
-New Mini map (click the small button at the bottom left of screen) Once opened you can zoom it in and out with +/- buttons on map.
-Proper ship Trajectory and Orbit’s drawn (toggle with T)
-New help tips
-New surface when zoomed in to a planet, this is a basic implementation but it looks much better, and will allow me to introduce much more interesting and varied terrain in the future. This also allowed me to scrap some of the massive image files I had, you might notice the file size is nearly half what it used to be, and load times are vastly improved.
-Many others but I have not kept track of everything, it has been a busy few weeks!
Bugs:
-Several actions while building a ship could leave floating parts not connected to the ship, most of these bugs should be fixed.
-Space center now properly closes when using other buttons.
-Fixed an issue where certain parts were doing double the physics calculations they actually needed.
