Across The Galaxy

Grid Spiral Search Formula

For Across the Galaxy, I looked for a function that will “find the closest open space on a grid in any direction.” It took some google-fu to find it, so I’ll document it here and save someone else (or future me!) some work.

Unity Tip: Combine Meshes for Performance and Organization

I recently found a little Unity scripting API I wanted to share. Did you know that you can use Mesh.CombineMeshes to take several different meshes, and make them one?

Across The Galaxy Dev Update 2017–08–01

It’s been a long time. Too long, friend.

Development Update 2017–08–01: Galaxy Generation, Planetary Guide, and More

Stories and the Galactic Guide (Update 2017–01–25)

It’s been awhile since the last update. I’ve been just focused on getting some core engine work done, and it is the kind of stuff that doesn’t show well until it is “done” (when you make games, nothing is ever 100% done). I’ve finished that…

Dev Blog 2016–11–01

I’m wrapping up the version of the system view that I’ve been working on for a few weeks. I have a few lighting tweaks to make.

After that, I’m going to do a cleanup pass through the system and planet generator code and through the system scene code. Shouldn’t take…

Making Skyboxes Directly in Unity

Here’s how you can create skybox assets directly in Unity.

All the tutorials I could find were actually for creating skyboxes in Blender and importing them to Unity. They all follow the same rough procedure — use the blender vertex painting…

Building the System Map: 2016–10–12 Dev Blog

Previously, I wrote that I was working on procedural (scientifically-based!) star system generation. That work is (almost) done, and so now I’m working on the star system overview / map.

Testing Your Luck: Avoiding Bugs in Procedural Generators

I’ve been cleaning up the star system generator and adding little features here and there. I built the original version “write only” — I just kept adding code until it worked. As you might expect, this resulted in some…

Walking the coastline: why adding multiplayer to No Man’s Sky is no stroll on the beach.

In case you missed it while it was making the rounds on “games twitter”, there was a widely circulated screen cap from a player asserting that Hello Games could have added…