Creating a Space Flight Simulator

Hi all, today I wanted to share a new project I’ve been working on: a Spaceship Flight Simulator! Having gotten familiar with Cinemachine and Timeline, this project provides an opportunity to put that knowledge and skill in practice!

Today I began by setting up the scene and atmosphere here below:

Initially, I want to set up an introduction cutscene where the capital ship “warps” in and drops the space fighter from below. After the fighter drops the player can freely fly the plane around and cycle between third/first person cameras.

After adding in my ships into the scene, I’ve created a custom skybox and implemented it via Window → Rendering → Lighting.

Under Environment, here we can add the skybox for the scene and adjust some of the lighting/fog settings.

Following this, I’ve added a Global Post Processing Volume with tweaks to Tone, Bloom, Color, and Gamma to bring out the colors and enhance the lighting especially from the engines.

To add to the immersion and improve the sense of movement, I’ve added in this VFX that simulates stars flying past the player:

To create Reflection and improve lighting behavior, I’ve added a light probe network that encompasses the initial play space and reflection probes on both ships.

Next I’ve added two VFX’s to function as fire emissions for each ship’s engines.

The fighter’s engine was visually lacking, so I’ve added a sphere with emissive textures as well to display a glow directly coming from the engine. This blended nicely with the VFX.

Inside of the fighter as a child object, I’ve set up a cockpit interior that has transparent windows, controls, and a seat.

Finally I’ve set up 2 virtual cameras for now, one attached to the cockpit POV view and the other for a 3rd person follow of the fighter.

The cockpit view needs substantially more additions and tweaking to enhance the lighting and detail such as lights on the monitors, etc. which will come in the future. Stay tuned for more updates!