In this update I’ll briefly go over what I worked on last week.  This week so far has been focused on bug fixes and preparing for another demo release which should be coming very soon!

Take a seat

Previously, when a player activated a seat, they would be “locked” into the seat by their transform being re-parented to the seat part’s transform, and their Collider / Rigidbody disabled.

This meant that the player would suddenly seem to have no mass, having no weight exerted on the seat.

So instead, I now keep the player’s physics active, and lock them into the seat using a ConfigurableJoint between the player’s Rigidbody and the seat part’s parent Rigidbody.

This means that the player’s mass now dynamically affects the construction they’re seated in.  Also, by setting up the ConfigurableJoint appropriately it allows for some sprung-damped “give” between the seat and player, as you can see below.

It does of course mean however that constructions now have a little more overall mass and a slightly different CoG when players are riding in them, much as in real life.

Highlighting render optimisation

When a part (or a whole construction) is frozen, selected, etc. it is highlighted with a glowing outline.  To achieve this the part’s meshes are drawn in a “mask” render pass that accumulates the outlines of all the highlighted objects.  However, up ‘til now, even parts / constructions that weren’t currently being highlighted would still be drawn in this pass (having no visual effect and not necessary).

So now I’ve modified things so that it no longer draws parts in the highlighting mask render pass unless they are actually currently being highlighted.

I also tweaked the mask render shader to fade the highlighting out over distance, and set the camera far clip plane to cull objects beyond the “fully faded out” distance.

These changes save on draw calls, and give a slight rendering performance improvement when viewing constructions with a large number of parts.