Final Update

With the development stage of my 20 percent project coming to an end, this is my last space simulation blog post; I hope to provide an overview of how the project turned out, what worked, and what could have been done better. Overall, I would say that the project has been a success. While I don't have all the features I originally intended to finish, I do have an entertaining simulation which while not exactly accurate is at least entertaining. It seems like in general the state of my project comes down in many ways to my decision to use Unity development environment, which resulted in both significant setbacks and advantages. The upside of Unity is that it is free, and it provides a set of highly sophisticated tools for physics simulation of all kinds and realistic graphics. However, as I have often found out in the last few months, a highly developed game engine is also necessarily restrictive. The addition of code to simulate things like changing gravity essentially broke the rest of the simulation, as the game engine has its own way of processing physics information, and it doesn't expect certain variables to change. I'm sure there are workarounds for these kinds of issues, but I was often forced to give up on what could be considered important features because of my limited time and resources. On the other hand, I also had much more time to work on the aspects of the project that would usually be thought of as interesting because most of the technical stuff was already in place and could be set up with a few lines of code. Overall my impression is that if I had spent an equivalent amount of time working on the project using pure OpenGL or DirectX my project would have been able to develop more in the direction I intended, but it would be much less entertaining or impressive to the user. So, after a semester of work, I'm happy with the project and I think I did all I could to bring it close to my original goals. If I were to work on something similar with a team of more than one, and with more time allotted towards development, I would probably turn to something other than Unity, but with the resources I had it probably turned out as well as it could have.