Wrap up

Congratulations on getting through this extensive tutorial. Hopefully you've picked up a few skills by importing and utilising data in Unreal Engine, and learnt a thing or two by creating your satellites simulation.

We're excited to welcome Unreal Engine projects to the Data Arena. Feel free to read our Wiki pages on Unreal Engine for more information on this process, and get in touch if you're thinking about starting a new project.

💡 Extra considerations and challenges

As it is now, this project is an interesting simulation of satellite orbits, but could be far more effective as a data visualisation. Currently, it requires the user to go looking for something interesting, so it's worth considering ways to highlight information and bring it forward.

If you're looking for ways to take this project further, here are a few suggestions:

• Add a colour key/legend to give context to your chosen colours.
• Append the LabelWidget with more information about each satellite's purpose, date of launch, country of operation etc.
• Add the ability to filter by data properties. E.g only view communications and navigation type satellites.
• Create a universal time scale variable accessible by the Satellite and Earth actors so this can be set in one location.
  • Enhance this by allowing real-time manipulation of this value to slow down or speed up the simulation.
• Allow for selection of multiple Satellite objects for comparison or tagging.
• Experiment with an option to freeze the position of a selected satellite to create an easier reading experience.
• Utilise the apogee property as well as perigee to average out the nearest and furthest points of orbit.
• Utilise the eccentricity property to draw realistic elliptical orbits.
• Adjust the InnerRadius option of each satellite's ring to set the thickness according to satellite distance.
• Set the distance of each Satellite object by mapping its perigee or apogee within a limited range to avoid distant objects becoming invisible.

Thanks for reading!