Galaxy Map
Project Type: Interactive Unreal Engine Experience | Role: Developer | Year: 2022
About
I decided to work with real data from NASA and other websites, to create our solar system with scientifically correct scale. Each planet size, rotation speed, orbiting speed and distance to the sun is the correct relative scale.
My Tasks
Unreal Engine 4 was used for this project. I focused on how to create a setup to easily build a galaxy. Each planet can be easily changed to antoher one, e.g. you could build your own fictional solar system. Each detail can be adjusted easily as well, as the variables are exposed in the editor UI, so that the designer can work independently from the programmer.
The planet is a class with components for each property, such as sound and info text. These components are connected to the widget class, that takes the information and displays it to the user in a predefined design. Then there is the CameraMovement class, which handles the coordination of navigating from each planet to another one. The designer can choose in the editor, which planet is assigned to which button in the OSC App.
Regarding the OSC connection: The OSC server setup is the only thing done in Blueprints, as there is no documentation but only one tutorial for it. This was also important for me to learn, how to utilize Blueprints and C++ together. I exposed the C++ function to Blueprints aka I coded my own Blueprint node, to connect the incoming OSC input to the correct funtionality.
For the OSC Connection on the smartphone I used the free App „Osc Controller“, where I had to input the IP address of my computer and the correct port.
