Rocket Ship Valet

Taxi the richest in the cheapest of spacecraft. 

Rocket Ship Valet is a high class space taxi service for people too rich to wish to take a taxi. So the marketing department decided to call the taxi service, a valet service.

Please note the shareholders have streamlined original plans for a modern luxury spacecraft with 6 degrees of control in favour of a more financially efficient repurposed retro rocket.lackered in fools gold and dubbed "The Golden Pendulum" .  

Don't let your momentum get carried away.

A physics assignment written with Blueprints in Unreal 5.3

Notable Unreal and Blueprint programming features demonstrated:

• Light customization of existing Niagara particle systems
• Use of physics/collision detection/forces
• Object detection via Sphere Cast
• Sorting nearest tractor beam (Sphere Cast result) ttarget by means of a Bubble Sort
  • Developer Note: while this was fun to implement in Blueprints, it would in fact have been more trivial to implement this in C++. This course was focused on Blueprints.
• Use of Physics Handle's for the tractor beam mechanic

General features:

• Velocity based damage
• Waypoint system (currently with broken waypoint indicators) 
• Acquire and deliver passengers
• Move objects on a timer via sin wave (oscillate up and down)
• Collision particles

Install instructions:

• Visit Rocket Ship Valet (1.7GB zip) using the pass: SaveFerris
• Download and decompress the zip file
• Run 'LunarLander.exe'
• If Windows SmartScreen pops up, select "Run Anyway"

Controls:

• W - Left Engine
• R - Right Engine
• T - Toggle Tractor Beam System
• Minus - while tractor beam is system is enabled, Engage Tractor Beam on nearest target (may currently only work with the numpad -, to be fixed in a future update) - nearest target will be highlighted in green

Play Guide:

You fly an old rocket with no thrust vectoring to speak of. It's also top heavy and underpowered. 

Patience is key.

Picture landings of SpaceX's re-usable rockets and how they land using a single booster and 4 rotating fins. 

Now imagine how you're going to do the same with two engines, but no fins. 

Getting airborne requires consistent even thrust. 

Space rockets are designed to go up. And more recently, fly back down.

They're not really designed to fly laterally. Your rocket is no exception but that's most of the flying you'll be doing in it regardless. 

Like a SpaceX rocket, you'll want to keep your ship pointed as vertical as possible. The more you lean, the more momentum you'll gain to move left or right faster, but remember any lateral momentum you gain must be negated before you can land.

To hurry, is to hurt. Don't hurry. 

There are presently two ways to bleed momentum in Rocket Ship Valet

One is to sacrifice some health and allow your rugged ship to collide with anything sturdy enough to act as a brake. You don't have to worry about impact forces incapacitating your passengers and subsequent lawsuits although that may change in future updates. (and velocity based damage isn't working on static meshes currently so until a future update crash all you want into the main pillars) 

The other is to keep your ships nose within 1-2 degrees lean from center and roll the throttle. Pick up your fingers like you're fidgeting, rolling your fingertips from left to right, or right to left, now try that on the W and R keys varying the length of time on each thruster slightly in favour of which direction you want to go. Want to go right? You want slightly more left thruster. Want to go left? You want slightly more right thruster? 

Manually pulsing the thrust in small rolling bursts is the easiest way the developer has found to move around and stay largely under control.

Hint: The game will try to make you lose control. 

The game currently lacks any way to reset yourself if you get stuck or fall sideways. You'll have to restart until such time as the developer gets off their ... and makes that happen.

The space platform you fly on has some gravity so you will fall back to the ground without thrust. 

One might say that if the controls require this much description, maybe the controls need some revision. Even a prof or two may have said as much!

But that would not bring the desired pain the developer wishes to inflict upon the pla....

- This just in, the developer has been sacked. The new developer will comply with the prof's recommendations.

- Of course we won't. This wouldn't be a simulation of it wasn't a bit technical now would it? 

- This just in, those responsible for sacking the developer that got sacked have been sacked.

- A Møøse once bit my sister

.....

Unless there are Møøse in space let's move on. 

- but wait, that should really be the title of your next game!

- actually yes, but shut up. We need to finish our homework.

- right.

Planned changes:

• Move engine controls from W and E to A and D
• Menu updates:
  • controls go to their own menu page or popup
  • story/about text goes to its own menu page or popup
• waypoint finders to be replaced with better asset or mechanism
• waypoint finders to point in the correct direction you actually need to go
• shorten engine particles (or replace with a different particle system)
• match angle of engine particles to ship angle
• lower executable size
  • remove unused packages and skybox textures

Under consideration:

• Reduce the need for a technical manual to fly this thing by having proper introductory levels with progressive difficulty
  • but it's a simulator!
    • shut up

• Display current passenger count
• Full game loop
  • Pause menu
  • retry
  • proper game won screen
  • control summary accessible in-game
• Track money earned from passengers
• Track money deducted from damage taken/repairs needed
• Emergency recovery thruster to right the ship
• Engine particle updates
• Fix velocity based collision on static meshes or replace with proper actors. 
• Final passenger goes to the carrier landing pad, and only the final passenger
• Visual tractor beam and bubble around character when tractor beam input is held

• Difficulty modifiers:
  • passengers die on excessive collision damage
  • passengers die on engine exposure (if you hit them with the engine particles)
  • score boost when modifiers are active