Today’s update to Solar Explorer includes “space dust”, which are subtle, random dust particles that fly past the camera whenever it is moving. The intention is to give the impression that there is movement in the gaps between planets. It really only shows up when in free flight mode because the camera moves so fast when jumping
Galaxy Explorer uses Dropbox because mobiles devices don’t have a built in file manager. This can make it very hard for the user to figure out how to get files onto their device and where to put them. After thinking about it some more, I’ve decided to enable filesystem importing using the new “Import CSV”
The multiverse hypothesis suggests that our Universe could be just one of any number of other universes. There are many competing interpretations about how and where these other universes might exist. One well known sci-fi idea is that throwing a die will spawn six universes, each differing only in which side of the die lands facing up.
With the camera issues fixed in the previous version, I’m now able to add a long requested feature to Solar Explorer: manual flight control. Access to manual flight control is from the new and improved toolbar at the bottom of the screen. I’ve moved the “Planets”, “Asteroids” and “Spacecraft” buttons into a combined “Mode” button
The new version of Easy Amazon Ads for Unity includes the latest Amazon API, which is version 5.4.46. The big feature in this release of Amazon’s API is that it has support for Google’s Advertising ID. If you are releasing/have released an app on Google Play that uses Amazon Ads, then you are going to
Version 1.1.0 of Galaxy Explorer fixes a few bugs, adds some useful new features, and changes a lot behind the scenes. It took a lot longer to complete this release than I was expecting. Most of the effort went into resolving the never ending changes in the tools I used. If you are interested in the
It is estimated that the Milky Way Galaxy could be colonised by a spacefaring species in as little as 5 million years. That’s travelling at sub-light speeds. Our Galaxy is 13.2 billion years old. If aliens exist, then where are they? They’ve had plenty of time to colonise the galaxy hundreds of times over. Apart
The gimbal lock problem has finally been fixed. This bug intermittently caused the camera’s Y axis to come into alignment with its X axis. When it happened, it would appear as if the camera became trapped in a narrow band around the equator of a planet. I eventually found that it was caused by three different bugs. Two
Occasionally, I’m asked why Solar Explorer doesn’t use a linear scale. The short answer is that I have yet to think of a way to do it. Imagine if the Sun was shown filling a mobile phone screen, making it about 9 cm or 3.5 inches in size. At this scale, Pluto would be over 300 m or 984
A Julian date is just the number of consecutive days after midday on the 31st of January 4713BC. They are necessary for many astronomy applications. I’ve used the Julian date system for various calculations in all three of my space themed apps. In the original C code for Solar System Explorer, I did it the “hard way”.