Work Log

Star Properties     It seems to have become tradition that whenever I set out to do something that I think will be easy, it ends up being the opposite. Making properties for the stars was no different. There were two main parts to this process. Making changes to variables apply to the material, and making those changes affect the lighting of the planets.     Making the variables apply to the material was not that hard as I had done that before. It just ended up being a time consuming process to do for all the properties. All that I had to do was implement a  PostEditChangeProperty for every property and set a vector or scalar parameter value for each on a UMaterialInstanceDynamic. Here's what that looks like for radius and mass: void AStar ::PostEditChangeProperty( FPropertyChangedEvent & PropertyChangedEvent) { if (PropertyChangedEvent.Property != nullptr ) { const FName PropertyName(PropertyChangedEvent.Property->GetName()); if...

  Major Progress     After another long break, I have returned and in the meantime I have made quite a bit of progress. I fixed the issues from last blog entry, made some more problems to fix later, added stars (and with that a new lighting system), and added ocean depth just to name a few.  Fixing Past Issues:     This was much easier than I thought. The main issue was that the biomes were generating across the wrong poles of the planet. This was fixed by changing  PointOnUnitSphere. X  to PointOnUnitSphere. Z .   I also fixed some 'array out of bounds' error that was preventing the planet from generating, but to be honest I forgot where I made that change it was so long ago (and probably as small of a change as changing that x to z).  Stars:     I knew I wanted more celestial objects at some point, and I was getting quite tired of dealing with the stupid biomes not working so I decided to pivot to making a star texture....