I think we’re due for an update!

I’ve released two alpha builds since the start of the year. The Web Planetarium is shaping up nicely (try it!). And I feel pretty good about code architecture and how the simulator can support an “extension” game or educational project. I’ll talk about recent progress and my thoughts for future development.

First, I finally understand Godot GUI construction! Instead of attacking misbehaving Controls and Containers with lines of code, I now let them do what they want to do. Good lord! How can something so hard suddenly become so easy? So I discarded our previous Planetarium GUI (a code nightmare) and assembled this in maybe an hour:

OK, I said “assembled” in an hour. But that’s only recently possible due to our new modular GUI widgets. These are bits of GUI that know how to talk to the simulator, and can simply be dropped into Containers:

We have 27 of these widgets now, plus additional GUI “mods” that can make panels draggable, resizable with settings, and/or resizable with drag margins. Here’s another “example” GUI assembled for the Template Project:

The core code also is very modular and extensible. The fundamental object class that orbits (and can be orbited) is the Body, which can have an Orbit, a Model, and other components that set its behavior and appearance. You can extend any of these classes in the ProjectBuilder to have your custom