Darn – Unity3D ‘Fail’…

Further to my hinting in the last post, I have to reveal a minor failure – or rather, a hurdle which I don’t have the time or inclination to jump.

Back in the last kickstarter, the idea of a ‘demo’ executable to show ships, stations et al came about – and this evolved into using Unity3D (free) to produce a webplayer – the ultimate in cool-some which would let me simply drop new models in for all to see.

Sadly – the mesh/material system in Unity3D is too rigid to make it easy to do that. 666 (Dom’s game engine) allows multiple materials per mesh, per model. Unity3d (as far as I can determine) only allows one material, per model. I’m not interested in reworking the models just to satisfy Unity3D. I may be wrong, I don’t know Unity3D well enough, but that’s the wall I’ve hit after quite a bit of research.

I wanted a web player which would let you select from a list of vessels and space stations – and then I’d update it over time with new toys (like exploring hard points, sub-systems, etc.) Ah well!

Anyway, for the fun of it – here is the result of my hours worth of experimentation over the past few months; http://dominium.maksw.com/test/shipviewer/viewer.html

Middle mouse button to zoom in/out.

It’s been a while since I last used Unity3D – and I quite like it, but I have to say I got sick to death of it crashing on startup whilst I tried to knock this viewer together 🙁

I may return to it at a later date, as it’s promising – but only if I can figure out a better way to get Dom’s models in without having to muck about or rework them. Please note these are not Dominium’s shaders, but Unity3D’s – although it is similar(ish) this is not how this ship looks in Dominium. It’s also dumbed down the texture maps detail, which are far higher resolution in Dom. I’ve not had time to find out why.

Anyway, in other news – I’ve made some tweaks to Dom’s scene management system, which allow me to assign waypoints and courses to a specific scene context (like a certain star, or planet). Up until now, they were stand alone entities within the game universe which page in/out as you fly near them. Giving them a scene context as well means I can easily render these items in the system maps, so they appear for stars and planets as you pick them. I wish I’d done this sooner – it would have made developing the autopilot a lot easier!

And finally, Chapter 9 is back from Wendy (my proof-reader) and I’m rolling the edits in. Chapter 10 is en route for proofing. Almost there!