Science of the Spheres - development

[Whirligig Girl]

Meet the Dynamic Debug Duo: Sgt. Stubbs and Lt. Vribble:

http://i.imgur.com/rwnXVDy.png

http://i.imgur.com/MZBphYA.png

They are specifically designed to emulate the sort of ships you'll be able to build once the construction system is made.

Realtime lighting - though it's manually arranged in that case, but the final result will look just the same. Need to actually build the system that makes it all work together.

I just rediscovered these beauties. Adorable things.

[basic.syntax]

Full immersion would mean simulating the construction of ships piece by piece, in real time, which is not only boring but a nightmare to actually create. On the other end of the spectrum is something more like KSP, where you're just presented with total freedom, a big list of parts and engines and materials and all that, then you save your craft and go, and it's ready to fly. Or perhaps an optional construction time mechanic, where your workers descend upon the assembly rack with welding equipment and piece together your designed ship over the course of an hour or so, which would be made easier with a "skip time" mechanic. Ideally some sort of middle ground can be found.

If any game mechanic is such that players might spend most of their use of it, skipping through it, its probably not worth much development time and effort.

Look at what XCOM: Enemy Unknown did: significant events get a new or updated scripted animation or video cutscene, as the player makes discoveries. Researching found artifacts doesn't require you to look at them in a 3D scene; the player really just wants the tech advance that comes from the research. Same goes for alien autopsy: yuk! icky! - that would have been a huge amount of work to make "interactive." Intercepting a UFO is a largely hands-off affair, because the most important thing to the player should be: did I succeed in shooting down the UFO? It's not meant to be an air or space flight combat sim. The focus is on the turn-based strategy game, which comes next. XCOM focuses on decision points, to the exclusion of some immersion.

Related: EVE Online likes to talk about immersion, but they don't spend development time on it, without a good reason. Frequent station docking and undocking is a core game activity. Their developers have specifically not created animations for this, because the dynamics of the game are such that you would skip it most of the time. Where they felt they had a good reason, they created an immersive transition animation to replace an old "loading..." message and screen change after a gate jump, to mask the un-skippable underlying game mechanics.

[NovaSilisko]

If any game mechanic is such that players might spend most of their use of it, skipping through it, its probably not worth much development time and effort.

Yeah, open and free is the direction it's likely to go in. Immersion shouldn't impede gameplay without very good reasons.

[daniel l.]

Hows the game goin nova im really anxious to try it, btw if you want it to go faster you should make a dev team, There are many people here who would be glad to work free on something so good.

[NovaSilisko]

Popping in again just to give a general "we're not dead" message (like New Horizons did)

[Gojira]

Popping in again just to give a general "we're not dead" message (like New Horizons did)

Out of sheer curiosity, how's development going? The devblog's not loading for me, so I figured I'd ask here.

EDIT: It decided to work, and wow. Things have really come a long way since prototype 1.

Edited July 15, 2015 by Gojira

[daniel l.]

Come on nova! Please post something, or at least release the game on a gradual update stance. Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeese I've been waiting for SOTS for a long time, I know its just a on and off thing for you but there are many players actually wanting this game.

Please say something

[daniel l.]

Nova Whats goin on? why is it taking forever.

[NovaSilisko]

Sorry. Other events have been dominating for a while now for the both of us involved.

I will say the current goal remains to get the sandbox demo made and released. That will consist of the headquarters, basic editor, a selection of parts, and a portal to a single pre-made solar system.

I will talk about a few things that have been going on, though.

I started with a prototype of the terrain system a while back, with a level of detail system which will allow very high resolution terrain up close. And I have more or less decided on how planet gravitation works (it's more complicated than it might seem at first), and how matter collects on them. I also have decided on how to structure galaxies in a way that also hints at the origins of the gravity cores.

The HQ town (St. Whalenson, Utah) at present borders a river and small butte, and contains a church, two houses, a water tower, two gas stations, two bridges, and a small group of shops (this will be expanded). I also made a nice cloud shader for it that slowly moves across the sky in a way that doesn't make it obvious that it's a dome overhead. The amount of cloud coverage varies over time, as well.

The means of camera movement for the player being seated at the control console has been improved quite a bit. The old method got very disorienting as it was tied to the mouse, and actually started to make me motion sick when I watched videos of it. So now it's simply an arrow on the left and right that you can click on to view different parts of the console (which has yet to be re-implemented though, so this only exists as a camera controller)

The website and this thread will be rebooted once things are further along.

[Endersmens]

Thanks for the update. And please please tell me you fixed the controls being mapped super oddly from mappin them to an xbox controller.

[NovaSilisko]

Thanks for the update. And please please tell me you fixed the controls being mapped super oddly from mappin them to an xbox controller.

Well, control axes will be fully customizable on a per-vessel basis. You'll be able to flip them around however you like, each engine/thruster mappable more or less arbitrarily (or it can be set up automatically if you don't want to bother). Also, the only camera views will be first person, so there's no frame-of-reference shift like you get in third person.

[Dodgey]

To be honest i completely forgot about this. I can't wait to invest in it though!

[Frozen_Heart]

Yaaay it lives!

[pincushionman]

…The HQ town (St. Whalenson, Utah) at present borders a river and small butte, and contains a church, two houses, a water tower, two gas stations, two bridges, and a small group of shops (this will be expanded)…

Do you intend for a significant portion of the game to take place in the "real world," so to speak (i.e., you need to walk your character to the hardware store for a bag of bolts they may or may not have enough of, or you need to bail out one of your engineers after an altercation at the bar), or is it simply background art for some kind of scene selection?

[NovaSilisko]

Do you intend for a significant portion of the game to take place in the "real world," so to speak (i.e., you need to walk your character to the hardware store for a bag of bolts they may or may not have enough of, or you need to bail out one of your engineers after an altercation at the bar), or is it simply background art for some kind of scene selection?

Well, your perspective generally remains inside the HQ (and possibly wandering out to its parking lot), but you don't get to explore the town directly.

[Rath]

Better showcase of how the player can play with physics objects:

That V-6 looking thing seems to have an embedded RTG

[NFUN]

That V-6 looking thing seems to have an embedded RTG

Yeah, you're 'That guy' that necromances* a thread with no new info, amirite?

*I know the game is still under development, but it's up to Nova to revive it with updates.

[NovaSilisko]

New concept render. Click for full size (3000x4000)

Lossless full-size: https://www.dropbox.com/s/szmzq4h78lt9o7c/airless.png?dl=0

This is based off of a perfectly valid planetary configuration with the current gravity formula. Banana + hoverer.

Edited November 4, 2015 by NovaSilisko

[Robotengineer]

Nice!

[NovaSilisko]

There will be another rendering soonish. I just have to make it, which is an important step. It will depict the exploration of a "dark asteroid", a collection of debris held together by gravity as opposed to a central core, orbiting a galaxy at a considerable distance in near total darkness.

[Noname117]

So are these renderings of objects created by the random terrain/planet/asteroid generator which will be in the game (Or a prototype of it), or are they handcrafted?

[NovaSilisko]

So are these renderings of objects created by the random terrain/planet/asteroid generator which will be in the game (Or a prototype of it), or are they handcrafted?

Handmade, intended to show what the ideal of the final game's look will be. Such a thing should be easily doable for the terrain generator, though. The bigger trouble will be getting nice lighting with radiance and such. That and nice rope physics.

[HafCoJoe]

I wanted to just say that this project has fascinated and amazed me from the beginning... I forgot to sticky this and thought it had died a while back when I stopped seeing posts on the blog. I'm so glad it is still being worked on! - Another thing I wanted to mention is that I can't wait for the music you have planned for this game. Your Bandcamp is visited frequently by me and I can't wait for your next releases! I can't remember if I mentioned it to you but I've used a few of your free tracks in videos on my YouTube. Well done man...

[Whirligig Girl]

There will be another rendering soonish. I just have to make it, which is an important step. It will depict the exploration of a "dark asteroid", a collection of debris held together by gravity as opposed to a central core, orbiting a galaxy at a considerable distance in near total darkness.

So real gravity does exist in the Microverse. Interesting. I wonder if there's one or two real stars or planets in the Microverse?

Are dark asteroids very large to account for their gravitational pull? Like mountains instead of large spherical hills?

[NovaSilisko]

I never said real gravity doesn't exist in the microverse, actually. It just usually is overpowered by the core forces.

Dark asteroids look just like regular asteroids in our solar system, and will range from meter-sized to kilometer sized at the biggest. Maybe more like comets, since they will be extremely cold. For several confidential reasons, large planets are extremely unlikely, and stars are impossible.