Ways we could maybe use aspects of I, Voyager in Moonwards
Hello
Charlie contacted us a while ago to let us know about I, Voyager. It's a great piece of software, a lovely way to get familiar with the solar system. It already works smoothly and looks good.
We haven't gotten the sky of our moon colony looking the way we'd like it to eventually. We may try using work already done in I, Voyager to achieve the realism we want - an Earth hanging in the sky, turning on its axis as time progresses, reflecting the sun the way it should, and the heavens spinning as they should over the course of the day. Right now, for the Earth we just have a simple ball hanging some 30 km from the rest of the game environment, emitting light, and the sun isn't shown.
Our project is quite extensive and right now we can't spend time on these kinds of touches. And also, I'm the asset person, not a code person, so I'm not the right person to discuss it, probably. But I'm opening the discussion to note that we feel this might be a good resource to us, and that we are interested in how this progresses.
If we had enough success we'd expand into depicting skyhooks, O'Neill cylinders, and a variety of ships. I, Voyager might impact our work there, as well. We'll be looking in here with interest.
Charlie contacted us a while ago to let us know about I, Voyager. It's a great piece of software, a lovely way to get familiar with the solar system. It already works smoothly and looks good.
We haven't gotten the sky of our moon colony looking the way we'd like it to eventually. We may try using work already done in I, Voyager to achieve the realism we want - an Earth hanging in the sky, turning on its axis as time progresses, reflecting the sun the way it should, and the heavens spinning as they should over the course of the day. Right now, for the Earth we just have a simple ball hanging some 30 km from the rest of the game environment, emitting light, and the sun isn't shown.
Our project is quite extensive and right now we can't spend time on these kinds of touches. And also, I'm the asset person, not a code person, so I'm not the right person to discuss it, probably. But I'm opening the discussion to note that we feel this might be a good resource to us, and that we are interested in how this progresses.
If we had enough success we'd expand into depicting skyhooks, O'Neill cylinders, and a variety of ships. I, Voyager might impact our work there, as well. We'll be looking in here with interest.
Comments
I've been pondering this from a high-level program point of view. Basically, you need ivoyager (the submodule) to be as unobtrusive as possible. Here are some features that should make that possible.
I've thought of a few solutions, but all are rather painful. One very ad hoc solution is to append an "_" to all of our class names. The more correct solution is to have an I, Voyager "namespace". So the class is now Vygr.SettingsManager or something like that. I'll have to think about whether that's possible in GDScript.
Edit: Wow! Based on a quick test, it appears that I can use a namespace in GDScript. As it happens, I've wanted to do this anyway so ivoyager would behave more like a "library" in my own projects. Perhaps I'll get this into v0.0.9.
Edit 2: No, that doesn't work due to cyclic references. We'd have to just prefix our class names. I'll have to think about that.
It may be that we need to move UnitDefs (and perhaps a few other constant defining classes) outside of the submodule. This gives me another "project organization" item to think about.