Hey all!
It's been a very difficult month. We had some major corrupted files within Unreal engine, which were found when creating the new re-fueling systems. If we'd have needed, we could have rolled back to last months update but luckily, that's not been needed at all. The corrupted files (Game State) have been found and deleted. The issue right now is that Dan needs to recreate them, and he's doing this in C++ rather than revert back to blueprints. This in itself should also help with a few bugs that we've had, so it's a win-win. Although, that's taking up lots of time over the past couple of weeks, and into July but we're getting there!
Dan explain a bit of this in the last stream (starts at 4:12):
At the beginning of June, Dan was creating the new NPC logic for the refuelling systems, this means that the NPC Captain will order to refuel, and the sensors NPC will now be able to choose a gas giant to go to. The last bit was about to be completed when the file got corrupted, so he'll get back to this soon.
We've been working on our first Shuttle design on streams lately, so we thought it would also be a good time to also start building a proper PID flight controller for both in-space and atmospheric flight-
While in space the flight model is fully newtonian, and the flight controller translates control inputs to RCS thruster firings. It does this based on thruster direction, so we can arbitrarily place thrusters around a vessel and the flight controller will handle the control mapping. It also has some autopilot functionality built in already, and is able to use the RCS thrusters autonomously to keep the vessel on target.
In-atmosphere, the Shuttle uses 4 landing thrusters in a manner very similar to a quadcopter. The handling feels a bit like flying a drone, with the addition of some main engines to provide horizontal thrust. The PID controller always tries to maintain a stable hover, so if you flip the shuttle upside down and take your hands off of the controls, it will use the landing thrusters to flip itself over and zero out its vertical velocity.
Everything is using real physics and real thrusters, so damage to a single thruster can immediately be felt in the handling. This also means every vessel will feel unique, because its handling profile is driven by its centre of mass and location of individual thrusters.
Our goal with the flight model is for it to feel meaningful and grounded in real physics, while also being approachable for non flight simmers.
To that end we'll have some flight assist modes that smooth off some of the sharper edges. We'll share more on this when the system is more fleshed out!
June YouTube Development Streams.
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Hopefully all should be back to normal in July, see you then!