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[_DivideByZero_]

Spoiler: Some screens (click to show/hide)

Early screenshot. I've since changed the appearance of the orbits and planets significantly


Another early one, before I changed the star code. You don't get #FF0000 red giants anymore, they follow the blackbody spectrum now.


Binary stars surrounded by an asteroid field. Asteroid fields are currently out, I'll have to reintroduce them at some point.


Screenshot of the new orbits and planet labels. This screenshot was taken after I fixed a particularly nasty bug with binary placement.


You can select multiple objects and drag the windows around. They stay with you even if you exit the system.

This is a project I've been working on intermittently for a while. I haven't been able to do much with it recently but I hope to turn it into an actual game at some point. The gist is that humans have somehow ended up in another galaxy and are repopulating after fleeing from something that wiped out Earth. It's currently just a giant procedurally generated starfield that keeps track of stellar evolution. I've modeled the evolution tracks of main sequence stars from .08 to 9 solar masses using a deterministic algorithm (you input a time and it tells you what the star is like at that time), but I don't have mass transferring binary systems in yet, nor do I have the lives of bigger stars that end in supernovas. There will be protoplanetary disks at some point, but I'd like to keep calculations down so accurate multi-body simulations are out of the question. Planets are currently just barren worlds, although once I do more reading there will be more. Currently every object, star or planet, runs a code that determines its current evolutionary state. That means that stars grow bigger over time and eventually die as giants. Planets aren't developed yet, and currently they just disappear if their temperature gets too high. They will migrate as their host star loses mass, but that's handled by ingame code for performance reasons.


I've always been upset at the lack of games focusing on the exploration/economic aspects of space colonization. That's not to say that space 4X's are bad in general, but they're mostly about war and politics, and finding a good planet generally means finding a big ball of stats rather than an environment with unique challenges (such as gravity--Earthlike planets are not economical to launch cargo into space from). There's no Interstellar-like problem solving and exploration, and you usually just send a ship to a system, look for terras, and start colonizing without any hint of interplanetary politics. While this serves the purpose of a game about conquest quite well, I haven't had much luck finding games which focus on the exploration and colonization aspects.

Questions or comments appreciated. I'd love to talk about space things.

[dorf]

I was JUST thinking about modern space games when I came across your post.
PTW!

In what way(s) will the player interact with the game?

[Flying Dice]

This is giving me very strong Aurora-esque vibes, but (as you said) with the focus planted on building up interplanetary infrastructure and exploration rather than fleet combat. Color me interested!

What sort of FTL system are you planning on? Instant-transit either through wormholes or with an independent drive? More akin to a warp drive, with travel time between systems based on distance? Would it allow FTL transitions outside of planetary gravity wells but still in-system? Or are these questions pointless because you haven't looked too much at this aspect yet? 

[_DivideByZero_]

What sort of FTL system are you planning on? Instant-transit either through wormholes or with an independent drive? More akin to a warp drive, with travel time between systems based on distance? Would it allow FTL transitions outside of planetary gravity wells but still in-system? Or are these questions pointless because you haven't looked too much at this aspect yet? 

I'm planning to not have FTL early on, and have FTL become unlocked at some point midway through the tech tree, mostly for travel between star systems rather than in-system.

The problem I have with accessible FTL is that it skews many games unnecessarily toward colonizing as many planets as possible, and it makes keeping your colonies under control too simple and easy. It makes an interstellar journey a drop in the bucket, rather than a project that requires time, effort, and a huge investment. I've been inspired by Count to a Trillion, where humanity sends a drone ship in advance to construct a braking laser and sends the manned craft two generations later. Now, that might be boring to people expecting a usual space game with thousands of inch-deep star systems that you can jump between at will. But if you find it boring you can speed up time, and I think the concept of a single mission spanning generations is too intriguing to pass up. And anyway, since the worlds are randomly generated one can just tick early alcubierre drives or natural wormholes if they like.

They're also what we are going to be stuck with in real life for a while. Due to timelag, I'm having a difficult time deciding whether or not to...
A) ignore timelag and have the player be physical embodiment of a nation or colony like in EU4
B) have the player be a single character and make his commands take several decades to register before FTL communication is discovered
C) allow the player to control multiple characters and switch between them as necessary to make sure the AI doesn't destroy his work while he's gone

I was JUST thinking about modern space games when I came across your post.
PTW!

In what way(s) will the player interact with the game?

The goal will be to have something like DF where ships and resources are automatically allocated to tasks you assign. You can tell individual ships what orbits to move into, though.

[Pencil_Art]

This looks cool. PTW.

[ShadowHammer]

This looks cool. PTW.

[mainiac]

This looks cool. PTW.

If you dont want FTL to be too OP you could make it so that it can only take place through wormholes that need to be constructed ahead of time.  So it could be extremely slow seeing as you would need to send a series of ships into interstellar space, have them come to a stop and then construct the next section of the wormhole.  It could also be very expensive meaning that it would only make sense for a well developed colony.

[_DivideByZero_]

I'm considering writing a quick, simple stellar model to automatically find critical points in a star's lifetime and predict the properties of the star given a mass, metallicity, and time. It might be a lot of work, but in the end it's nice to be able to make tweaks to the model rather than having to railroad every star on a predefined evolution path.

Plus, it's great practice. Does anyone here happen to be an astrophysicist? (probably not...)

If you dont want FTL to be too OP you could make it so that it can only take place through wormholes that need to be constructed ahead of time.  So it could be extremely slow seeing as you would need to send a series of ships into interstellar space, have them come to a stop and then construct the next section of the wormhole.  It could also be very expensive meaning that it would only make sense for a well developed colony.

There is no "OP," it would be available to most factions in the game if it existed early on.

I think the concept of including FTL systems to bypass long travel times in space sort of detracts from the whole point of having a game in space. Space is huge, so huge that the travel times don't even begin to reflect how tiny we are (though not necessarily insignificant) compared to the universe. It would be like writing a story about 16th century colonization, but give ships a runic enchantment that lets them travel really fast. Suddenly a difficult voyage becomes a cakewalk, and the struggles of keeping your sanity aboard a ship for several months are gone.

Space becomes a fancy backdrop.


Of course, FTL would help speed the game up after the early stages, but I'd like to give players an opportunity to explore different ways to get there, and try out different starts. For example, picking a system with a protostar as your "embark zone" may give you fair research opportunities, and perhaps antimatter collection opportunities due to the circumstellar disk (Saturn is known for collecting relatively large amounts of antimatter within its rings. Now image that on the scale of an entire system...), but you're not likely to find any habitable planets in any of the protostar systems you examine. The benefit of starting off close to opportunities outweighs the penalty of starting so far from a suitable home. Your people will just have to survive until they can collect enough antimatter for an interstellar journey (or discover FTL).

[Antsan]

PTW

I like the idea of no FTL.

[Sheb]

PTW

[_DivideByZero_]

I've been trying to decide on a name. I've come up with Era of Stars, which sounds a little meh to me, but the acronym is EoS which is pretty cool.

Also, parallax on the sector view.

From a graphical standpoint, it looks cool and helps capture the depth of space... but it might make clicking on things annoying.
Also, there are conflicting signals from the rings around the stars. The ring is supposed to represent the radius of the star to make it easier to find giant stars and the like, but as it stands it looks like it has to do with the depth of the star and its distance from the camera. I don't have a solution to this as of now.

[10ebbor10]

The problem with using slower than light systems is that you get absolutely ridiculous travel times. I mean, at 0.1 , which is fast, the closest star systems would be decades to hundreds of years away. That's a really long time, looking at civilizations progress in the last 100 years.

[LanziVision]

i love this idea

[_DivideByZero_]

The problem with using slower than light systems is that you get absolutely ridiculous travel times. I mean, at 0.1 , which is fast, the closest star systems would be decades to hundreds of years away.

At .1c the trip to alpha centauri would take ~four decades.
But ships don't travel at a constant speed, .1c means months of acceleration and deceleration. The "accelerate until the midpoint and turn halfway" thing is actually wasteful and costs more fuel for a marginal increase in speed, but accelerating a fourth of the way and costing for a bit should work. Depending on your civilization's power output accelerating a small probe using a laser should be doable.

Also, remember the adage that a drive's effectiveness as a means of propulsion is directly proportional to its effectiveness as a weapon.

That's a really long time, looking at civilizations progress in the last 100 years.

That's the point. By the time the first humans arrive in another star system, who knows what Earth will be like if they even get back? That's part of the mystery!

The point is to make a game that spans many generations like EU4 or CKII. You have in-system problems to solve, but each starship is a huge investment. If you send a fleet to attack a star system, you don't know if the enemy civilization will still be there when you arrive. So not only do you bring your drone armies specialized for combat, but you also bring along ships for trade, colonization, manufacturing, etc, to deal with all the contingencies that could happen.
Taking over an interstellar empire could involve invading it through immigration or colonization rather than all-out war. And any single attack on a system is going to consist of in-situ construction and planning. You might have soldiers that, on arrival, turn out to be completely outmatched and decide to live among their enemies instead. Lots of things could happen.

You could also just shine your launching laser on an enemy star for a few years, then turn it off. They'll start to prepare for war by building combat ships to meet the ships they think are coming, only to realize they've wasted a lot of effort on just .
Perhaps warships won't even be able to decelerate by themselves. They'd force their targets to build braking lasers and shine them on the incoming warships to slow them down, or else the warships themselves slam into the system's planets and infrastructure at relativistic velocities. Warships would probably have to be automated, then, or at least be self-contained and manned by crew that don't realize the plan until they are told in the middle of the journey. The systems that emerge could be interesting.



It's something vastly different from what we normally get in space games, so I'm willing to try it out. If it doesn't work out I can always just put FTL earlier in the tech tree.

[_DivideByZero_]

After a bit of fiddling (read: two weeks of restructuring the way stellar evolution is done, and how systems are generated/binaries are formed), I have a working model for mass transfer systems.




Also, you will notice the new procedural coronas I've added. They are animated in real time, although it's only noticeable at higher timescales. The default 1 hour-1 second is too slow. Unfortunately it's difficult to get a smooth animation of the coronas because the game operates in delta time, that is, each second of real time corresponds to a fixed amount of time ingame, irrespective of framerate.