Hello, Spacers!
Today, a look at two things we've been heads-down on lately - how characters work under the hood, and what it actually takes to simulate a solar system at real scale.
🧑🚀 A New Foundation for Characters
We're moving to a new universal framework that will power both player characters and NPCs. It gives us a lot more flexibility across body types, outfits, and future customization options.
This system is the base for everything more detailed we want to add later - faces, body shapes, and beyond. We've also significantly upgraded our spacesuits compared to the older versions you might remember, and this is just the start.
⚙️ Building a 1:1 Solar System: What the Engine Couldn't Do
Three things we had to build from scratch, because Unreal simply doesn't handle them out of the box.
Multi-axis gravity. UE supports gravity on a single axis by default. For a realistic space environment, that's a hard wall, so we wrote our own gravity simulation from scratch.
Procedural generation at real scale. Generating celestial bodies at true 1:1 solar system scale isn't something off-the-shelf tools can do. We built our own GPU-based system that offloads the heavy math to video cores. GPUs have far more cores than CPUs, so generation speed scales with them.
Double-precision math on GPU. Most engines, Unreal included, can't fully run double-precision floating point on the GPU without losing accuracy. At solar system scale that loss matters a lot, coordinates start to drift and physics breaks down. So we implemented double-precision computation ourselves.
None of this is exotic research. It's just what happens when you refuse to fake the scale.
Happy to go deeper on any of these if there's interest in the comments.
Want to see more of this kind of thing? Our Discord, Reddit and Twitter get project updates more often than Steam does:
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