Skip to main content

February

Monday 3rd​

  • Cleaning up UGUI Super TreeView demo scripts into something usable for Ephemeris
  • Experimenting with building a custom tree view using vanilla Unity layout primitives
    • Unity layout is very slow with deeply nested hierarchies
  • Back to cleaning up Super TreeView

Tuesday 4th​

  • Refactoring tree view layout system
  • Connecting lines to child items and sibling items, based on new layout events
  • Fixed expanding/collapsing sub trees
  • Deleting some demo code from asset, moving the rest out of the FUI package

Wednesday 5th​

  • Cleaning up super treeview editors
  • Fixing potentially unbounded memory use in pooling
  • Splitting demo script up into smaller/more composable scripts
    • Connect to sibling
    • Connect to the first child
    • Expand/Collapse toggle button
    • Label
    • Icon
  • Refactored layout events to simplify event handling when elements are recycled/moved to another subtree
  • Working out how to do live tree search (rapid and efficient showing and hiding of many tree nodes)
    • Removing and adding the nodes would work, but seems expensive. Maybe do-able with careful pooling but maintaining state seems like a nightmare.
    • Scaling items to zero height could work
      • Layout system needs work to respect scale
      • Some thing like lines connecting to nodes will look weird (trying to connect to zero height nodes)

Thursday 6th​

  • Created Detach and Attach methods which act like Delete and Insert, but do not manage object life time. This allows rapidly removing and re-adding items.
    • Fixing layout issues caused by detach/attach
  • Added support for disabling objects, updated layout algorithm to ignore disabled objects
  • Fixed creating new objects not initialising everything in the right order

Friday 7th​

  • Adding methods to recursively enable nodes in tree view
  • Removed some expand/collapse animation (scaling mode)
  • Cleaning up clipping related code, no longer dynamically adding and removing components
  • Begun implementing filtering
    • Partially implemented as a separate filter component
      • Need to handle new nodes added after the filter is applied
    • This is going to have too many GetComponent calls during UI updates

Monday 10th​

  • Started on a new system for filtering
    • Caching info in behaviours (just one lookup)
    • Maybe apply filter in coroutine (spread work out over more frames)
    • Handling add event and applying filters as soon as items are added
  • Chasing down layout issue when enabling items
    • Modified helper for invalidating layout to walk up tree instead of down
    • Added the same system when enabling all (faster path)
  • Adding UniTask package to FUI project
  • Applying changes in a coroutine, spreading the work of a huge UI tree over more frames
  • Starting a new layout with the same filter again every time a node is added or removed

Tuesday 11th​

  • Creating tree view prefabs:
    • General prefab with icon, vertical line, content box
  • Modifying collapsing so it always takes the same time, no matter how deep the subtree
  • Removed async applying, it was causing very hard to track down layout issues in weird edge cases
  • Deferred applying filter until update, this means several changes to the filter within one change only incur one apply

Wednesday 12th​

  • Stylising prefab in FUI style
    • Creating icons
    • Creating crisp outlines
    • Adding blur background on content
  • Fixed some layout issues when content height changes

Thursday 13th​

  • Adding a highlight to tree view items
    • Created a behaviour to show highlights and "ping" them
  • Refactoring node caching, so less behaviours need looking up at runtime
  • "Pinging" nodes when they are matched
  • Final cleanup
    • Moved scripts into final locations in FUI package
    • Added editor menu items to create tree view
  • Updating packages in main project
  • Added treeview into multiplayer gameplay scene
  • Investigating occasional slowdowns at high timespeed
    • Modified backpressure to be based on the shortest sampled rail, instead of shortest integrated rail
    • Modified rail sampler to not begin sampling until there is valid rail data to sample. This prevents fresh entities from causing backpressure
    • Test entities seem extreme:
      • Added in the past
      • Extreme precision
      • Very short max rail length.
      • Fixed that - there's testing a worst case scenario, and there's whatever that was!
  • Discovered that updating the cinemachine package broken astronomical cameras

Friday 14th​

  • Reverted Cinemachine package
    • This fixed the camera
  • Upgraded Cinemachine again
  • Rewriting astronomical camera controller to use new input system
  • Experimenting with a new astronomical camera controller
    • Right click + move mouse: orbit around focus point
    • Mod + Right click + move mouse: orbit around focus point, faster?
    • Mod2 + Right click + move mouse: move focal point (pan)

Saturday 15th​

  • Experimenting with stencil buffer for lasers
  • Putting together a test scene with decals (emissive, for hot spots) and screen space lens flare

Sunday 16th​

  • Experimenting with depth nodes in URP to render lasers at right depth
  • Got it working with stencils!
    • Process explained in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzM8LGzMjmc
      • Set material on something (e.g. damage blob) that writes a value to the stencil, does not write colour or depth
      • Move everything you want stencilled to a separate layer
      • Modify renderer asset to remove this layer from Opaque Layer Mask and Transparent Layer Mask. This prevents it from being rendered.
      • Add a Render Object
        • Set Layer Mask to this separate layer
        • Override stencil, Compare Equal to whatever the value was that was written in step 1

Monday 17th​

  • Using new input system with CinemachineInputController for astronomical cam
  • Added a pan input with a modifier (Shift + Right Click + Drag)
    • Enabled Input Consumption which makes more specific bindings (e.g. Shift + Right Click + Drag) pre-empty less specific ones (Right Click + Drag)
  • How to keep panning values?
    • Switch away from target1, switch back to target1, should it restore the pan?
      • Yes
      • Focus stack might already handle this, as long as everything has a VCAM
    • Need a re-centering button
  • Created camera pan script using new input system

Tuesday 18th​

  • Minor cleanup on camera stack controller
  • Started on a tree view controller
    • Individual "section controllers" can add root sections and a system to manage themselves
  • Created a tree view controller for kepler bodies
    • Finding them and tagging with marker component
    • Processing static bodies too
  • Updated SolarSystemHost using old inheritance based way of setting up worlds to use GameTimeWorldHost (partially switching to the newer composition-based way)
    • Fully migrated to composition-based sim host
    • Moved utility bits of old SolarSystemHost out to new scripts

Wednesday 19th​

  • Restyling treeview prefabs to make them more compact and slightly less visually noisy
  • Making prefabs auto size to content by default
  • Setting up search for treeview in main project
  • Cleaned up tree view string filter test code and moved it into main project
  • Generating "filter tags" for planets as they are added to the UI, e.g. Solar/Earth/Luna
  • Case insensitive matching/filtering
  • Adding click handler to treeview prefab
  • Resetting camera to origin when moving planets
    • Causes a jump, need to warp the camera during transition
  • Moving the camera around Jupiter sucks, it's too big
    • Panning and scrolling should be relative to planetary radius
  • Fixing weird Jupiter colours
    • Tinted orange/brown, when it should just be white
  • Quick investigation into rail sampling cost
    • Timings with 200 entities (very rough):
      • 550us with kinematic interpolation
      • 430us with linear interpolation
      • 390us with no interpolation

Thursday 20th​

  • Continuing investigation into rail sampling cost
    • Adding "hinting" - storing where valid data was last frame and using that if it's still applicable
      • Page hints: 480us
      • Index hints: 405us
      • Hinting with Linear interpolation (not actually usable, just for comparison): 320us
    • Future optimisation: use linear interpolation when things are out of the camera frustum
  • Copied ship name generator from Protologic, added a few more name fragments
  • Attaching names to generated NBodies in test scene
  • Showing list of NBodies in UI
    • Scroll bar
      • Something is offsetting the child content of the scroll view
      • Caused by TreeView.Init
      • Removed TreeView setting it's own layout properties
    • Click focus on astro/near view?
  • Fixed error with Jupiter Axial tilt loading

Friday 21st​

  • Import new sound libraries
  • Noticed some performance spikes in editor
    • Profiled in build, all seems ok
  • Removed Sol from planets list, reducing indentation by one
  • Compacted tree view layout some more
  • Updated small camera to use new input system
    • Panning does not work for this camera, it breaks the compositing trickery
  • Cleaned up page hinting optimisations
  • Fixing some errors caused by deleting tree view nodes
  • Noticed some jittering
    • Reduced how aggressive partial interpolation is, so it's smoother (errors are spread over a longer time)
  • Added some buttons for lock and relative mode on planets
  • Noticed poor perf when scrolling
    • Seems like Pixel Perfect canvas is expensive
    • Layout scales with number of items in canvas, so split UI into more canvases (e.g. one for the scroll content)

Monday 24th​

  • Added button to make rails relative to planets
  • Adapting camera min radius to planet size
    • Scroll sensitivity automatically adapts too
  • Fixed scale of Europa
  • Adding physics colliders to planets, so they can be clicked on
  • Fixing some UI elements eating raycasts
  • Refactoring on click scripts
  • Debugging why raycasts aren't working at all now
    • Fixed raycasts not working in sub canvases
  • Created click handler to focus planets
    • Attached to planet prefabs

Tuesday 25th​

  • Added invisible "backboard" objects to camera, to catch all raycasts that don't land on anything else
  • Changed planet focus to be double click
  • Refactored content importers, moving them to the main project assembly
  • Started on a crosshair, showing what's selected/hovered over
    • Move to target
    • Move 4 corners independently
    • Move lines
    • Animate it?
    • Created animation for crosshair appearing
    • Locking crosshair onto gameobject
    • Creating animator state machine for cross hair (appear/disappear)
    • Resizing based on screen size of target

Wednesday 26th​

  • Investigating a single frame flicker when snapping view from planet to planet
    • Delayed switching scene origin by one frame
  • Created a pool of crosshairs, so multiple objects can be highlighted at once
  • Designing near/far view system
    • Tab to switch between views (if the current entity supports it)
    • When switching from entity -> entity, show the same view (near/far) if new entity has it
    • Implement explicit near/far mode in camera controller (at the moment it's implicit)
    • If given an entity on no camera layer, find on in hierarchy
      • Add a marker at the root pointing to the relevant layers?
  • Creating a system for managing view modes
    • Added view mode to camera manager
    • Creating a method to get supported view modes from a GameObject
    • Created marker component pointing to different bodies in different view modes

Thursday 27th​

  • Updating camera stack controller to switch view modes dynamically
  • Fixed issue with cinemachine camera channels not being set correctly
  • Creating a method to switch view mode, if the current focus object supports other modes
  • Adding button to switch view mode
  • Added a general script to trigger buttons from an input action (i.e. hotkey)
  • Experimenting with cinemachine cameras for a "glance" feature when hovering over something
    • Can set a camera to only control rotation
    • Slewing to things at extreme distances seems to be broken (even though it's only rotating)
    • Child VCams don't seem to be visible to the brain
    • CinemachineMixingCamera is a thing, but that kind of requires doing it manually

Friday 28th​

  • Fixing planet visual radii
    • Mercury
    • Venus
  • Imported improved Venus surface texture
  • Experimented with packing roughness info into mercury texture
  • Creating a fuel tank component, for tracking total fuel on an entity
    • Updated engine burn system to subtract fuel as burns happen
  • Removing old Docking Sim fuel tank component
    • Fixing up docking sim scripts referring to furl
    • Fixing pod prefab to work with new view modes