#15 Build Site Update

After implementing the SPMT in the previous update, I thought it would be neat to quickly throw in a basic version of the Build Site to use the SPMT to drive there or from there to the Launch Site. But the Unity Editor thought differently. When I wanted to put grass on the terrain in my Unity2022.2.0b3 beta version it was flickering when using DirectX12, apparently a known issue that was resolved in newer beta versions. So I had to upgrade, but which version. In Unity2023 another bug was fixed: the water is not rendered in front of clouds anymore there. Not that important, but I hated that bug, and there are always fun new features to play with. So I decided to upgrade to a late alpha 2023 version. Baaad idea! Because when I finally made a first player build to test something, I started to get random crashes - but just in the player. Initially I ignored it, because it worked in the editor and I was already quite progressed in the new version. But when the time came for the Patreon build, the random crashes were still there, even though the Unity Editor was now in beta phase, but that doesn't really mean much. They just start to add less futures and do more bug fixing.

(btw, from my experience their bug hunting department is quite good, considering that they probably get a lot of reports, I always get responses in a reasonable amount of time (few weeks) and all issues have been resolved so far in one way or another)

Then I spent a couple of days to find a cause of the random crashes, but it was impossible - until suddenly the new 2023.1.0b3 beta version dropped and fixed it! What a waste of time, but I could finally finish it up after weeks of fixing all kinds of bugs.

Morale of the story? Avoid alpha and early beta versions or embrace the pain! :D

Another huge issue was that in the 2023 Editor there seems to be some problem with terrain editing - right when I needed to work on the terrain - great! Usually the editor gets laggy after editing the terrain for a while and sooner or later it will crash, erasing your progress, if you don't save often. Counting all the crashes together, I must have lost at least a day or more just to this.

These are just two short stories of the daily life of a Unity beta user :D - On the flip side, there is always cool new stuff in the betas, that I didn't even get to look at like the new 6-way lighting VFX. Probably something for the booster overhaul...

Now to the terrain: It seems buying high resolution satellite pictures is super expensive, in the thousands of $ if you want to cover everything from the launch to the build site. So I used the free Sentinel 2 data with 10 m resolution for most of it. I still had some higher resolution stuff from the past for the launch site. But I have to get rid of it as I don't really have the rights to use it. I wanted to repaint everything with higher res terrain textures anyway. So the photos are just needed for reference. 

For the elevation data there actually exists some public LIDAR data by  NOAA/USGS with 1 m horizontal resolution and 4.5 cm vertical res, which is pretty good. The only problem is getting this into Unity. There are a total of 22 terrain tiles to cover the area that has elevation data. So from the LIDAR image I had to manually select and save the correct rectangles as individual files for each of the tiles. Then after importing to Unity, make sure everything is aligned properly. Which required some iteration and when the import and alignment is done you still have to adjust some settings and smooth the gaps and in general do some smoothing and elevation adjustments here and there. Lots of manual work!

For the terrain textures I got most of it from polyhaven- very nice site! Texturing is pretty straight forward or would have been, if it wasn't for the constant crashes. Because of the crashes there is still a lot of the area untextured. It might take some time until I come back to it...

In the end there wasn't much time to work on the build site buildings or to add more features. At least you have the option to use dual SPMTs now. So on that side we are good for the moment. The only problem is that due to the distance to the origin of the world (which is at the launch mount) the physics already glitch a little bit due to floating point precision (I think). But it's not too bad. I'd rather work more on the launch site again then approaching this issue right now.

My current plan is to continue with some bug fixing, adding small features and content with a couple of smaller patches. Then see how KSP2 is doing, if or how modding is possible, and then later go back to the usual bigger updates that are one or two months apart.

Changelog:

•  added some build site buildings and extended terrain there
•  improved terrain with height maps, some grass and a bit of textures
•  SPMTs can be spawned and grouped now
•  added graphics settings menu and re-arranged some settings
•  added grass toggle
•  added water toggle and a simple ocean plane as option
•  added toggle to turn off control panels on OLM and tower in additional settings
•  there is now a selection to start with booster and ship in different positions when restarting
•  on stacked position, booster and ship transport stands get interchanged in case you want to destack or catch the ship
•  fixed water rendering in front of clouds (by using new Unity version)
•  there are also shore waves now with foam in the latest water version, but I don't really know how to set it up properly, looks a bit odd now, not sure if I keep it
•  fixed controller settings dropdowns
•  increased ray tracing reflection ray length from 50 to 150 and shadow max distance from 333 to 555
•  clouds are now default off on low quality
•  added support blocks to ship transport stand so that it doesn't glitch off on build site
•  added drivable cybertruck (very basic)
•  added option to spawn mods at defined position
•  added custom theme music to start menu
•  replaced the unity logo on the executable with the StarbaseSim Discord logo just for fun (obviously needs some adjustment for this use case...)