Space Escape progress - the compass

I like the idea of a game world and HUD being stitched into the same universe. It seems to meld well in a sci-fi setting as well, where you can easily understand a computer rendering a lot of data on some display for you, plus a bunch of extra stuff. Minus the interpretive sensors, your computer does this already.

I felt like this could be pretty useful in Space Escape, because where your ship aims is not necessarily where you are going, and having your bearings relative to the Earth is pretty important when one is setting out to do a gravity assist maneuver.

After some work, I turned up with this:

Degrees show exactly what it's for, and it follows the Earth as you move about.

This is artwork I am capable of doing from front to back. I used Blender and its cylinder prefab model. To make it so the number you are facing is not mirrored, I inverted all of the normals. The texture is painted within the inside of the model. While working on this I found out that both Blender and Unity support Photoshop's preferred PSD format. This makes it nice because I'm always a save key-command away from seeing my work in-game. To get the texture to appear as it does in the game itself, I had to set its material to particles/additive.

I'm not familiar with how Quaternion rotations work, and I'm still wrapping my head around some of Unity's rotation math. Getting the right kind of code took maybe an hour of actual work, but this is the behavior that drives the... behavior:

All of this is viewable from the web player here.