Making a stylized FPV drone simulator | Devlog 0
hi and welcome to devlog zero of unknown fpv
my name is Robin I'm a C plus plus developer and I'm very excited to show you what I've
been working on the last year let's go [Music] [Music] in this devlog I will give you a brief
introduction to the project I will explain the process that I use to recreate real-life
race tracks and a play test yes there is a Playlist Live and I will tell you all about
how you can join that later on and how to get started with the simulator as well the reason
I started making a drone simulator is because I was flying a lot of drones at the time and
I wanted to improve my C plus plus skills and this was such a nice combo that I just had
to do it in this simulator I wanted to be able to practice multi GP Style Racing just
like in real life I also wanted the world to be stylized and vibrant because I hadn't seen
that in a simulator previously and the physics I wanted to go for somewhere between arcade
and real life experience so with that out of the way I had to figure out how does a flight
controller work and how to implement the physics the flight controller software took a little bit
of digging and time reading through the code to understand but basically it starts with your
controller input that is filtered and then used with something called rate to calculate how fast
your drone should rotate along an axis thanks to onboard sensors the flight controller knows its
rotational speed and it also knows the target speed we requested what happens next is that with
the help of a pit controller the flight controller software regulates the motor of put mixed to the
four quad Motors by mixing I mean controlling the quad's individual motor speeds depending on
the way we want the Drone to rotate or not let's have a look at the physics so the Drone has
four motors with propellers attached to them this generates four trust vectors that gives the Drone
both lift and forward momentum the Drone is also affected by gravity and there is also a force
called drag acne on the Drone that is affected by surface area angle of attack and the speed of
the Drone so then I got started implementing my drone character using blueprints I use a sphere
collider for the Drone and I merged all the trust vectors into a single one I also used the physics
approach with simulate physics turned on and then I started implementing a control Loop using
blueprint functions I added trust by using the blueprint function called add force and since I
had merged all the four trust vectors I could not control rotation using that but that was sorted
by using an a torque node so these were great for prototyping or single player however it didn't
work good for multiplayer which is also called replication in Unreal Engine what you can see
here is the amount of network erections going on and this is not good fortunately for us there
is a third person example shipped with Unreal Engine that has great multiplayer performance
as you can see here there is way less Network reactions going on and this is still using the
same emulation settings that I used previously which means this is performing much better of a
network the magic behind the third person example working so good over network is partly because
of the correct movement component however I'm not going to cover the CMC into detail since it's a
very Advanced topic and it could be pretty boring side of the Box the third person example doesn't
support 6 degrees of freedom movement and I had to detrimp the code to find spots where I could
change it to allow for that and I made this lunar lander example project as a proof of concept
and if you would like to try that you can find it in the description and feel free to use it as
inspiration so once I had a lunar Landers sample working I continued by implementing a replicated
six degrees of freedom drone once I hit the level of performance you see here I knew that I could
safely move on to creating a world Ford drone to Flying and this is what the Sim looks like after
about five months of level design creating assets sculpting rocks making grass it's got the
trees well just making a lot of stuff right for track creation I used to Consumer grade
drone I set the track as my subject and then I Circle that while taking photos these photos
are then used in a process called photogrammetry after I've taken enough photos I'll then process
all of them in a software like reality capture that turns it into a 3D model which I can import
into Unreal Engine with the help of the 3D model I can now place the stylized obstacles along the
racetrack just as you were in real life and once that is done it's time to try out the race track
and here you have a side by side comparison of the simulator versus real life and to be honest with
you the footage on the right is actually slowed down since I cannot match this Pro Palace page
just yet but I guess with time I'll get there as well if I put in the effort anyway I'm just really
happy how this track Recreation turned out [Music] okay then it's time for me to show you how
you can join the play test open your browser go to anonfpv.com you can also find a link in the
description here you'll find buttons for Steam and Discord over at steam you'll have two buttons one
for wishlist and one for the play test make sure you click both once you join the Discord server
please write something in play test because that will alert me of you wanting to join I'm gonna
give you some tips now of how you can set up your drone we start with binding the axis so if
you look on the illustration down below you have the left joystick for throttle and your and the
right joystick for pitch and roll there are many different ways to set up your joysticks but this
is the most common way so that's what I recommend let's open up the quad settings so under the quad
settings you have a setting called camera angle the camera angle is gonna affect the angle of
the Drone while you're flying and a higher angle is going to give you more forward momentum but
less lift and a lower camera angle is going to give you more lift but less forward momentum
let's move over to the raid settings so the rates are basically the speed at what your drone
can turn depending on the joystick movement for now I would recommend you to use a profile like
slow and steady if you're new last but not least the physics settings I've added a few presets
here and I'd recommend you to play around with the freestyle one first however let's say that you
want to play around with the physics yourself then you have three sliders here trust will basically
change the amount of trust that the Drone generates and it would equal like putting bigger
engines and batteries on the Drone the second one which is the air resistors basically translates
to the drone's surface area if you would increase that the Drone is going to fight more against air
it's going to reduce the top speed and it's also gonna slow down much faster on the other hand if
you decrease it the Drone is going to get the much higher top speed but it's gonna take way a longer
time to slow down and the third one which is the Gravity by increasing that you can increase the
pull of the Drone to the ground and by decreasing it it will become basically like flying on the
moon you're just gonna be floating forever two questions for you so the map is pretty big right
and I'm curious what you would like to see added to it if you could choose what would you like
to see and the second one the dev Vlog is there anything that you wish that I would cover into
detail that you may be seen here but you um how did he do that kind of and with that said enjoy
the play test and I'll see you in the next one
