Orbital Scrap Metal – The Video Game V2.0
Trash Force V1.0
Summary
Trash Force V1.0 is a game developed in Unity and game play is about defending the satellites from incoming debris by hitting them with a laser which de-orbits them and burn up in the atmosphere.To make the game more immersive and fun for the players, we have added space monuments like moon and the International Space Station.
How We Addressed This Challenge
We have developed an interactive 3D game and perpetual educational tool as well to inspire people to gain knowledge about debris and think about how to capture and dispose them in a proper way. The game has been made mathematically and astronomically accurate as possible in the given time frame, with the orbital dynamics of the debris simulated with Keplerian orbital propagators. We have added and spread out satellites and loaded them with their respective two line element data which we obtained from the spacebirds.json file Although the game is just a simulation for the time being , we are intended to add missions and systematic score methodology to make the game more interactive and fun.
How We Developed This Project
We are big believers of education trough enjoyment and nothing was quite enjoyable as much as video games were amidst the pandemic. Our approach was to simulate the debris situation in way that it's obvious for the player to understand it's a problem for everything in the orbit or passing the orbit. We used Unity game engine to build the dynamics and coding was done in C#, we grabbed some free models from the internet and also had to build some of our own. The biggest challenge we faced is the lack of game programming knowledge inside the group. We are all competent software programmers and we wanted to challenge ourselves by getting involved in a field that we are not used to, given the time frame we were working on it was quite an uphill battle since almost every element had a learning curve to it.
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
We used TLE data from the SpaceBirds.json file given in the resources and we loaded them onto satellite's scattered around the globe so the user can interact with them, putting the player in the boot's of a space explorer. We also used 3d models from https://nasa3d.arc.nasa.gov/models to use in our simulation
Project Demo
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iLaOAm9BXGOjyzVdWM7NfsVcSkVzn9ZE/view?usp=sharing
Project Code
Data & Resources
https://nasa3d.arc.nasa.gov/models
https://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/spacebirds
Unity 3d platform: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/index.html