Children of a Dead Earth: realistic space warfare game

[curiousepic]

"I never want to corrupt the ultimate goal of this project, which is to discover what space warfare would be like, rather than to say what space warfare would be like."

I've watched this trailer like 10 times, pausing every second to pick out details. Note: those aren't lasers, they're kinetic projectile tracers (there's a non-visible laser striking a target at 1:20).  Lots of awesome info in the dev blog - apparently it's been in dev already for 2 years. And it's on Steam.

EDIT: It's out!

Steam | Dev blog | Twitter

More good discussion on G+ posts of the blog entries: https://plus.google.com/u/0/s/childrenofadeadearth.wordpress.com

Edited September 27, 2016 by curiousepic
It's out!

[Canberra_Gaming]

The moment every single Battle Club member has a purpose in life that they've been preparing for.

[tater]

The only issue I see is if it is multiplayer... time warp has to be a thing, and everyone needs to do so in lockstep, at all times.

[Streetwind]

1 hour ago, tater said:

The only issue I see is if it is multiplayer... time warp has to be a thing, and everyone needs to do so in lockstep, at all times.

I used to play a game called Star Wars: Rebellion, which had a timewarp feature and multiplayer. Admittedly only two players max (as there were only two factions to pick), but still.

The timewarp problem was solved by simply setting the lowest common timewarp level among both players. If one had it at step 3 and one had it at step 2, it would run at step 2. If one player dropped out of timewarp entirely, the game didn't warp at all. Basically, whenever you didn't have anything to do, you cranked up your timewarp, and if your opponent also had nothing to do, the game would fast forward. If your opponent was busy doing something, you waited until they were done. When the game fast forwarded enough for your purposes, you stopped the timewarp again and did your stuff. It largely felt like singleplayer, with the exception that sometimes timewarp wouldn't happen instantly because someone else was still busy.

[tater]

Yeah, that works, as everyone is in lockstep.

[razark]

49 minutes ago, Streetwind said:

I used to play a game called Star Wars: Rebellion, which had a timewarp feature and multiplayer. ...  The timewarp problem was solved by simply setting the lowest common timewarp level among both players.

I knew I had seen a system like that somewhere.  Thanks for reminding me which game it was in.

[curiousepic]

5 hours ago, tater said:

The only issue I see is if it is multiplayer... time warp has to be a thing, and everyone needs to do so in lockstep, at all times.

Unfortunately looks like CoaDE isn't currently planning to be multi, so the point is moot for now.

There's a new blog post up that details a bit more of what the game is actually like to play - looks like more of the gameplay is actually in the orbital mechanics than combat!

Edited April 29, 2016 by curiousepic

[tater]

Good, actually, provided the AI is halfway decent.

[Accelerando]

There's no such thing as a project without vision. Any project that claims to be so just inherits its vision from whatever it's drawing its basic assumptions from - in this case, it's sfconsim/Atomic Rockets/the hard-SF fandom/etc.

With that said, I'm very much looking forward to this. It'll be great to have a working game engine to test out various concepts/models/assumptions of space combat within, especially once modders get their hands on it. I just hope that when they start advertising to the public, they'll move the "Scientifically Accurate" bit from the tagline to somewhere less conspicuous (that's not how you sell copies of a game to people outside of the insular hard SF fandom!!) so that it doesn't disappear into obscurity or outright flop like the other half-dozen realistic spaceflight videogame projects I've seen floating around.

[Vanamonde]

Looks like Kerbal Violence Program. 

[RainDreamer]

This is quite interesting! Looking forward to see how this turns out. Really enjoying the dev blog too.

[Cydonian Monk]

Definitely looks interesting. Agree that the dev blog is a good read.

[regex]

I Greenlit that immediately.  The sheer noodliness of the engine designer alone is worth it.  Hopefully it has a "merchant" campaign or something where combat isn't the whole focus, although I'll still play the hell out of it regardless.

[Superfluous J]

I have no particular desire to participate in a realistic space combat game, but I'm very interested in finding if this game meets its stated goal of giving people the ability to find out what space combat would be like without proscribing anything on them but the laws of physics and reality.

We've discussed real space combat here for years and it's been a hot topic in science fiction for decades, and the one thing we can all agree with is that nobody can agree on anything.

...except those who disagree with that, of course.

[Nuke]

its like that space combat game from the xplane dev, but with depth.

[Matuchkin]

Is it out yet? Where can I find a download link?

[todofwar]

That ship designer looked awesome. Looks like you design everything down to the engines.

[weissel]

On 4/29/2016 at 6:13 PM, Streetwind said:

I used to play a game called Star Wars: Rebellion, which had a timewarp feature and multiplayer. Admittedly only two players max (as there were only two factions to pick), but still.

Introversion's "DEFCON" (2006) did the same, except for 6 players ...
... and of course you learned to do things quickly, at 5x speed (the lowest acceleration beyond real time, the fastest being 20x) because dropping everyone in real time was a hint that you were up to something ...

In addition it was possible to set the maximum amount of 1x "time" a player was allowed, i.e. you got 300 seconds (5 minutes) of 1x, and if that was up, you could not slow down below 5x (IIRC), so that no player could slow the game too long for everybody.  (A typical game would use 30-45 minutes wall clock time, multiple hours in-game time, up to 8 hours.)  Of course there was an "Office" mode that was locked in 1x, which you could then play over the day (say, in the office :-)

On 4/29/2016 at 10:22 PM, Accelerando said:

There's no such thing as a project without vision. Any project that claims to be so just inherits its vision from whatever it's drawing its basic assumptions from - in this case, it's sfconsim/Atomic Rockets/the hard-SF fandom/etc.

Someone writes a simulator to understand how cars deform in a crash and what such a crash would mean to occupants.  They use all the knowledge about crashes, the physics and materials science behind that, and use knowledge of simulation and computer science[1] to create that thing --- what exactly is their vision?

Do they even have a vision how a car is 'supposed' to crumble?

Or are they rather building a research tool, with no "vision" what the outcome should be, except that it should be as realistic as it can be, no matter where that takes them and no matter if they like the results?

If CoaDE was drawing it's vision from the sources as you say, then CoaDE would have a given idea how things will work.

Example: if someone draws their vision of space travel and space combat from Star Trek, then they would build a world, a game, a system where reversing the polarity solves 50% of all problems, stealth is extremely good, combat distances are closer than the typical distances between the opponents in WWI trench warfare, you can warp (except when you cannot) and laser beams do glow in space.  They would start out with these ideas in mind --- and an idea if this was to be more of a multiplayer bridge simulator or more of a singleplayer action game --- and build that.  They may change some things, they may abandon the game (or divert into a quite new direction) if they see the results and think it does not work.  But they start with a vision, with a 'foregone conclusion' what the result should be.

CoaDE seems to not have much preconception ("vision") how ships are to be build (well, except tapered cylinder --- to which I do not really agree it's the only or main right way[2]), armed, engined, mass ratio'ed, etc.  Which means you can build the ship that best matches the tactics you want to try, no matter how crazy.  You are not restricted to the tactics that fit to a certain type of ship (say, photon torpedoes, 2D, shields, warp and impulse drives, very close engagement ranges).

 

 

[1]  "Computer science is a terrible name for this business. First of all, it's not a science. It might be engineering or it might be art, but we'll actually see that computer so-called science actually has a lot in common with magic, and we'll see that in this course.

So it's not a science. It's also not really very much about computers. And it's not about computers in the same sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators, and biology is not really about microscopes and petri dishes. And it's not about computers in the same sense that geometry is not really about using surveying instruments.

In fact, there's a lot of commonality between computer science and geometry. Geometry, first of all, is another subject with a lousy name. The name comes from Gaia, meaning the Earth, and metron, meaning to measure. Geometry originally meant measuring the Earth or surveying.

And the reason for that was that, thousands of years ago, the Egyptian priesthood developed the rudiments of geometry in order to figure out how to restore the boundaries of fields that were destroyed in the annual flooding of the Nile. And to the Egyptians who did that, geometry really was the use of surveying instruments.

Now, the reason that we think computer science is about computers is pretty much the same reason that the Egyptians thought geometry was about surveying instruments. And that is, when some field is just getting started and you don't really understand it very well, it's very easy to confuse the essence of what you're doing with the tools that you use. And indeed, on some absolute scale of things, we probably know less about the essence of computer science than the ancient Egyptians really knew about geometry." (http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-001-structure-and-interpretation-of-computer-programs-spring-2005/video-lectures/1a-overview-and-introduction-to-lisp/)

 

[2] Cylinder types roll quickly, and if shot from the side a shot will likely go in, through and out instead of having lots of things to smash.  They also have the space for really long spinal weapons. But they turn slowly (which is ... ah, unfortunate for spinal weapons). It may be that maneuverability is more important than armor for some tactics --- and maneuverability may be important to some tactics.  It may be that in the end tapered cylinders are the better choice ... but we do not know.

Edited May 3, 2016 by weissel
typo

[tater]

If the ship is mostly propellant, a through and through is a bad thing, particularly when the propellant is under pressure.

[Accelerando]

3 hours ago, weissel said:

CoaDE seems to not have much preconception ("vision") how ships are to be build (well, except tapered cylinder --- to which I do not really agree it's the only or main right way[2]), armed, engined, mass ratio'ed, etc.  Which means you can build the ship that best matches the tactics you want to try, no matter how crazy.  You are not restricted to the tactics that fit to a certain type of ship (say, photon torpedoes, 2D, shields, warp and impulse drives, very close engagement ranges).

Sloped armor is still an assumption as you admit, and that is important, since the structure of a spacecraft's armor (or lack thereof) is certainly one of the defining features of a warship. Yes, this means that they have a vision of how things should be. Just because you agree or don't agree with it, or that it makes/doesn't make sense to you, does not mean it is not an assumption. And CoaDE makes many other assumptions, such as:

1. Available technology (no, you cannot use photon torpedoes or shields)
2. Specific impulse - MPD thrusters and NTRs are the upper limit, limiting your Isp to some tens of thousands of m/s at most, and the game assumes a situation where it is economical to manufacture these en masse.
3. The theater of space combat. CoaDE's space combat model assumes that space combat occurs entirely between contesting fleets meeting around specific intercept points. No mention has been made of ground-based installations such as laser batteries, for instance (at least, not yet).
4. Weapons loadout. CoaDE's developer(s) have stated that lasers, kinetics, and missiles will all be useful to ships in different situations, and all combat focuses on large capital ships with a fairly even distribution of armaments of each type of weapon, plus drones. This certainly makes for a balanced and interesting game mechanic, but I'm not convinced that it is the model of space combat.
5. Situational assumptions. As mentioned before CoaDE assumes that it makes economic sense to build NTR thrusters en masse, and it also assumes that large heavily armed and armored capital ships make economic sense to build over any other type. It assumes that laser power generation and point-defense targeting software will not outclass kinetics and missiles. And so on.

The developers recently outlined another assumption, which is that space battles will use nuclear-thermal rockets exclusively over MPDs. This hinges on the assumption that slow burn times will be absolutely undesirable in a space war, which goes back to the economic assumption that NTRs are mass-manufacturable in CoaDE's universe, and that they are cheaper, lower-maintenance, and safer than slow-burning engines. I'm not saying that these assumptions are wrong, but I think the developers may be overlooking other viable possibilities in their zeal to say "Our model is objective".

Broadly speaking, any experiment requires a design, which requires subjective decisions. An experiment must be pruned down to a certain chosen range of test data, which will be analyzed via specific methods chosen by the researchers. The researchers must ask a question, which defines a certain range of possible answers that can be derived from the experiment. This is not objective either; it is specifically chosen according to what the researchers consider important.

Say we want to evaluate the viability of some space warship design; that is to say, can we build it? There are multiple ways to tackle that question, such as:

1. Is it viable in a purely physical sense - is it possible to build structures like these that function, and do so without instantly breaking down?
2. Is it viable economically, given a certain scarcity of resources and manufacturing infrastructure, a certain economic context to the space war?
3. Is it viable in an engineering sense - would this design be dangerous because it puts sensitive hardware right next to critical failure points, for instance, or would it be prone to failure for some other reason?

And so on. And then you have to decide what you're going to simulate and how granular the simulation will be for each thing. Will you need complex models, or will spherical cows suffice? None of these decisions are "objective", they are motivated by what the testers think is important.

This isn't to say that nobody can ever come closer to describing reality, of course. Obviously, no technology would work if nobody could model reality to any degree of reliability. But the relative "objectivity" of science comes from repeated experiment and independent peer review, which is to say that "objectivity" derives from the synthesis of many different subjective analyses.

Car crash simulators are somewhat of a strawman here because car crash simulators build upon a vast library of existing knowledge that is built up off of both decades of (subjective) theoretical work and review in physics and engineering, as well as previous experience with the operation and crashing of actual working cars and related machines. We know how fast cars generally will travel when they impact each other, and what range of speeds it's possible for cars to achieve, and we know how massive they are, for instance - because we have built millions of cars and we have an infrastructure built around cars. Space battles have none of that.

Again, this isn't to say that CoaDE is necessarily wrong in its vision - it just may be stepping over some interesting and viable possibilities. I'd like to see actual simulations of large monolithic lasers, or kinetics platforms, and other alternative designs entirely, even if the ship/fleet design model put forth by CoaDE seems more viable from the developer's own analysis. And I'd like to see space combat models that evolve from our present situation, where space access is expensive and very little infrastructure exists to support the kind of interplanetary economy you'd need to build the kind of warships CoaDE proposes (which is another subjective assumption).

Edited May 3, 2016 by Accelerando

[curiousepic]

15 hours ago, Accelerando said:

Sloped armor is still an assumption as you admit, and that is important, since the structure of a spacecraft's armor (or lack thereof) is certainly one of the defining features of a warship. Yes, this means that they have a vision of how things should be. 

Just FYI the game itself does not restrict the shape of the armor. If you watch the video closely, the ship editor appears to form the armor in a similar way to procedural fairings in KSP, adjusting to the interior modules (and perhaps it allows you to customize it further), so the game itself is not making that assumption. (I guess it is making the assumption that it would be radially symmetrical, but I bet you could make a roughly spherical ship at least).

Quote

Weapons loadout. CoaDE's developer(s) have stated that lasers, kinetics, and missiles will all be useful to ships in different situations, and all combat focuses on large capital ships with a fairly even distribution of armaments of each type of weapon, plus drones. This certainly makes for a balanced and interesting game mechanic, but I'm not convinced that it is the model of space combat.

Weapons loadout is likewise customizable.  I believe Zane is still investigating more types of lasers, which may vastly change the interplay between the types, but I wouldn't call the "distribution of armaments" an assumption.

Quote

And CoaDE makes many other assumptions, such as:

1. Available technology (no, you cannot use photon torpedoes or shields)

2. Specific impulse - MPD thrusters and NTRs are the upper limit, limiting your Isp to some tens of thousands of m/s at most, and the game assumes a situation where it is economical to manufacture these en masse.
3. The theater of space combat. CoaDE's space combat model assumes that space combat occurs entirely between contesting fleets meeting around specific intercept points. No mention has been made of ground-based installations such as laser batteries, for instance (at least, not yet).
4. Situational assumptions. As mentioned before CoaDE assumes that it makes economic sense to build NTR thrusters en masse, and it also assumes that large heavily armed and armored capital ships make economic sense to build over any other type. It assumes that laser power generation and point-defense targeting software will not outclass kinetics and missiles. And so on.

Otherwise, CoaDE is making these assumptions, yes.

Quote

Again, this isn't to say that CoaDE is necessarily wrong in its vision - it just may be stepping over some interesting and viable possibilities. I'd like to see actual simulations of large monolithic lasers, or kinetics platforms, and other alternative designs entirely, even if the ship/fleet design model put forth by CoaDE seems more viable from the developer's own analysis. And I'd like to see space combat models that evolve from our present situation, where space access is expensive and very little infrastructure exists to support the kind of interplanetary economy you'd need to build the kind of warships CoaDE proposes (which is another subjective assumption).

I have to agree with the rest of your assertions.  CoaDE's "vision" is a very specific domain.  But within that domain, the assumptions are few. I think that's the best we can hope for for what appears to be a one-man, no-budget project.

Also FYI, theres a lot of good technical discussion going on on Winchell "@nyrath" Chung's G+ posts of the blog entries: https://plus.google.com/u/0/s/childrenofadeadearth.wordpress.com

Edited May 3, 2016 by curiousepic

[tater]

You make assumptions about the tech (in terms of how you characterize the weapons, etc), then the effectiveness/tactics just have to fall out, with possibly unexpected consequences.

KE weapons should be able to explode into shrapnel, or disperse bearing-balls, for example. At a certain range this guarantees some hits at a much lower mass per impact, but also possibly avoids over-penetration vs a long-rod penetrator. 

[Wjolcz]

I want that.

Are there specified system requirements anywhere, or is it still too early?

[Bill Phil]

On April 29, 2016 at 10:35 AM, tater said:

The only issue I see is if it is multiplayer... time warp has to be a thing, and everyone needs to do so in lockstep, at all times.

Ksp multiplayer mods have solved this to an extent.

[tater]

I'm aware of those, and no, they don't really, particularly if combat is a thing since knowing where they are is critical if you could know where they are.