Building wind turbines and solar panels. Tools, work, and more!

Wow! Looking back now I've done a lot since my last post. Here's a video with my new ladders and construction system:

The tools appear in front of you now, and most have sounds they play when you use them. Tools have durability (they wear out) and some use battery energy. And we have yellow work cones now! I did a neat trick for the sounds: say I have ten seconds of "wrench". I start playing at a random point and loop, so the tool sounds different each time.

Another quick improvement was the skybox. 

Skybox..? The player is positioned right in the centre of a giant cube (the skybox), and the faces of the cube look like a sky. Making your own is not as simple as using paint/gimp/photoshop though. If you don't do it right you can tell it's a cube! That's just silly.

I didn't make a fancy 3D projected one like this fellow this time though. It's just pure colour with a hint of radial gradient. There are no seams because I made the edges of every face the same colour. This is still remarkably close to the Martian sky though. Big payout for little time investment - always a good choice for a team of one.

Ladders! The ladder script builds a ladder of any height using a 1 meter tall segment that it repeats over and over. I did a lot of tweaking to make the ladder feel comfortable:

• You only move up/down when you're looking at it. So you can stop climbing and look around freely.
• You get locked to a nice place just in front of the ladder until you jump off.
• You have to leave the ladder entirely before reconnecting.
• You can move higher than the topmost rung so it's easier to get off.
• There are also a ton of funny little issues that had to be solved.

I've never made a ladder before and it was fun thinking about all the ways to do it. I am considering making a super duper ladder script and putting it on the Unity Asset store. It would include some features I skipped like tilted ladders. 1$? We shall see.

I ordered four Mars books! "The Case for Mars" by Zubrin was great but it's inadequate as a sole technical reference. This merits its own post.

Lastly, I did a ton of modelling work again. I am finally starting to feel like I have a strong variety of models to make a game with. Here are the item icon renders:

Charging station. This model took awhile! Cables. Cables everywhere.

Electric generator.

Lithium battery.

Martian concrete.

MPPT controller. I always have to look up what this acronym stands for: maximum power point tracking controller. Used in devices like solar panels and wind turbines because the electricity generated is irregular. I really still only have the vaguest notion of what this does.

Power cables.

Solar cell.

Solar panel.

Steel. How might an early colony access the huge stores of metal on Mars? Hmmm!

Turbine blade.

Wind turbine.

There are three main types of wind turbine. If only I had a better idea of which work best on Mars... For now, this one will suffice. Perhaps the four Mars books I just ordered will help? :)

Wire cutters.

Wrench.

So what's next? I must follow my own rules and not talk about what I will do. Instead: we have electricity. What other resource is critical to a Mars colony?