NovaSilisko

No legs on the next several launches I believe. Maybe there will be boostback tests anyway?

Here is an image taken of the galaxy after a miscalculated engine thrust amount on the test spacecraft: So, yes.

I think it was the starlight, yes. Mostly judging by the texture, the only red ground texture right now has a bunch of rocks on it.

Working on planet visuals a bit

Oh god, Whackjob, I can't imagine what you might do when the full construction system is made, with all its joints and mechanisms and harpoons...

Ah. It's just a loose chunk of rock, as opposed to the planets which have static cores at the center. The comet won't have any appreciable gravity, either.

Didn't say I was going for the planetarium mode, I'm probably keeping it around only as a debug tool (as in, likely not released). Also, the generation systems will be moddable so it can be set up generate however you like - if you want it to be totally random per-save, I'm sure there's a way that could be done. Maybe make it use the hashcode of the save name + the provided seed to generate... A cloud of dots is easy enough to render. Not sure if it'd have a representation of star color or not. Could make it low FPS with a sort of scanline effect to show that your single-digit kilobytes of memory are being pushed to the limit to render this scene. Comet?

Floating point issues dealt with. Courtesy of r4m0n: (jittering = off, smooth = on)

A bit of a problem with a planet viewer/map mode is the game's set in the 1970s, and I want everything to have some manner of physical equivalent. Some sort of magic box that lets you fly through the solar systems you've charted out is a bit far fetched, unless it was a super crude vector rendering of the area - in which case, it's useless for much navigation or study... stars will need a means of cataloging however, possibly a set of telescopes that measure parallax, put onto a probe moving at high speed to measure the apparent motions of the stars. From there, you can view a map of the galaxy, rendered as a simple cloud of points, maybe with markers showing where your ships are... Doable, dare I say, with 1970s tech. It's not totally random - to enter a galaxy you enter "coordinates" or a "coordinate string", which the game interprets as the seed for the random generator. Entering the same seed into the coordinate box will always yield the same generated galaxy (barring major changes to the generator which will likely screw up everything) for any player. Each galaxy will always have the same stars and planets, allowing discoveries to be shared.

Debating whether the final game ought to have a "Planetarium" mode that operates like space engine, where you can just fly around a galaxy and inspect things. It would be fun, but I also feel like it might spoil a lot of the game if you can immediately fly around and discover a bunch of things ahead of time. Part of the challenge of the game will be having absolutely no idea what to expect when you first go through the gate. With the planetarium, you could go inspect the area ahead of time to learn all of its secrets.

Menu mockup + animation

That's what's already being done. It works a bit differently in our case though. The physics we have are operating off of double precision, millimeter accuracy out to several billion kilometers - but the visual aspects of the scene are not. Thus, the visual parts of the world have to be offset accordingly, while the physics continue to exist in their own frame. It confuses the hell out of me though, which is why I'm not the one setting it up.

I've got a thought for how to explain it. Some creatures also will indeed have methods of propagation through space.

Writing what will hopefully become the final system generator. Does all of the things the debug one did but more flexibly, takes input from a given star from a generated galaxy. Also wrote a point mesh generator for the galaxy, which as the name implies renders single-pixel points: It needs a fancier shader, though, using the z-buffer to determine brightness, as well as making them more than just a single colored pixel.

Yes. By far. It took two and a half hours to get back through customs in when I was flying back from Mexico.

Or just add new functionality in regular updates like a reasonable human being, and go back to making proper expansion packs for huge additions (or be nice and add huge additions into the game anyway) I'm not sure what you meant by "standalone" vs "supplementary" though. DLC by present definition is always something that adds onto the game, in general stuff like weapon or map packs.

Ah, I love these videos. Found them on the nasaspaceflight forums a while ago, myself.

I love flying. Especially when the plane's jostling around a bit, turning, landing, etc. Even more so if the flaps/ailerons are visible. It's cool seeing the machine do its job despite the rough conditions that often make up the upper atmosphere. Get used to the idea of the wings wiggling, though, they're very flexible and do that a lot.

Flew 400km away from the central star. Floating point issues are fun. Note though that this is only the visual part of the ship. The physics are double precision and will be accurate over several billion kilometers of travel (the wobbling of the ship is me being bad a flying). To compensate for this, the visual counterparts to the physics objects will be offset so that the camera is always near the center of the world, while the physics continue to operate on their own coordinate system, in precise beauty.

... I need to read that damn book.

Nah, it's just a model I use for scale. r4m0n's currently fighting some hard drive issues, so the collision meshes being fully functional might take quite a bit longer than anticipated. We'll see. Edit: You know I have a feeling that this thread being stickied might've actually decreased its exposure given a lot of people have a tendency to glaze over stickied threads given how infrequently they change

Personally, I'm quite convinced it's entirely impossible. The laws of physics that we know - and have verified to several decimal places of precision - come to a general conclusion that FTL travel is indeed completely impossible. Even the much-hyped "warp drive" still runs headlong into the problems of causality violation. Hell, as far as physics are concerned (and for reasons I'm not 100% clear on), FTL is the same as time travel...