I spent some time looking at miniatures and wargame rules last night (and bought a discounted Unity book from Packt that I’m hoping will give me more insights into areas of interest).
I need to take the next step on build-out of my ‘Cluster’ game in the next few days and generate a population of stars from a prefab and then get hit-testing of mouse clicks to star working. I think I have most of the bits in had to carry this off, but I need to test it out.
In the initial pass, I’m not looking to implement anything overly fancy in the star generation and positioning code. I may even simply walk them around the board with reckless abandon at first.
I found some examples here that seem to show how to take a mouse click position on the UI and hit-test the viewport normal from that position. This code even does (or suggests) the zoom function I was thinking about implementing in order to view individual systems.
I expect in the longer run, there will also want to be various control panels supplied with information that is more classically UI style to make managing the overall effort easier. Ideally this could be done without these, but I’m not quite sure how to get there at this point.
I think I may set up the board game tonight and look at running a few turns solo just to get back into the feel of the game. If I do, I’ll post pictures of the board with counters on it and related items.