Outstanding work by you and your team, again! As a retired aerospace engineer, I'm well impressed by the attention to detail you've all put into this. Even some of the 'out there' sci-fi has a ring of plausibility to it, Dr's. Michio Kaku and NDeGT would be proud. Well done and subbed.
Thanks! That is very much true for us as well. I grew up playing the Elite (and similar) series through the 80's and 90's, but as much as I love those games they've never offered the true experience of serving aboard a fully realised starship. Multiple decks, hundreds of rooms, and with all ship systems fully simulated. It's like being given the keys to a fully working starship and being allowed to go wherever you want with it :)
Good progress and quality work so far! My hopes for a Space Age space exploration game like this would include a space station orbiting Earth and a Mars station and social hubs as well both ground based and in space. I am not expecting a Star Trek themed game but something along the lines of a peaceful exploration centered on discovery and socializing in a mature setting in a utopian future game world. 😊
I really liked how the NPCs appeared to be enjoying, and reacting to what was going on outside the ship. Very nice touch. By the way, the size of the fonts, at least in the helm station, are about what I need to be able to see. I know this is from a long time ago, but that's a good reference for you to go by, for establishing a reasonable accessibility feature for low vision users. Thanks for the video.
Loved that planetary scale comparison there at the end! Questions: 1) The sun from Mercury didn't seem as bright as I would have expected. Have you considered allowing the sunlit areas to get visibly blown out (exposure-wise)? It would be cool if the windows had to have that classic sci-fi "window shade" tint effect applied to them to compensate. Similarly, perhaps accentuate the dimming of the sunlight further out (including on the outer hull and planets), with the windows again able to compensate by enhancing the apparent light levels? 2) Will warp travel between planets need to take into account gravitational pull? I.e. will the travelled path be a curved path, or a straight line? 3) Will it eventually be possible for players to import custom 3D models of, uhm, _other_ starships, to have out in space? I.e. not for them to be flyable, or with interiors or anything... just the external hulls, perhaps inserted into orbits, etc? If so, what tools will be required to get a 3D model into the game?
Hey, thanks for the questions :) 1 - The lighting in Unreal Engine is a bit of a balancing act, because if you use the true Lux values with auto-exposure then in order for the view outside to be reasonable, then the inside of the ship becomes pitch black. Polarization of the windows is definitely something I'm considering, but it's not quite as straightforward as it sounds because there are windows all over the ship and directionality is a factor. We need to ensure the starfield remains visible when looking away from a light source. 2 - The travel between planets and star systems will be linear, because when you fold space you form an event horizon around the skin of the warp bubble. Spacetime (and therefore gravity) behaves very differently under those conditions. Essentially the ship is completely isolated from the flat spacetime outside of the bubble, existing on its own spacetime island. 3 - There will be a lot of customisations options built into the game, for example the ability to change UI-screen colours, carpet colours, the ship name, registry, etc. In the future we also hope to build some form of mission-scripting tool for the Steam workshop as well. It would also be nice to give players the ability to import their own custom meshes for alien species as such, but that's fairly distant on the radar. In reality I imagine third party tools will likely crop up before anything official, but as long as they don't break the game we'd have no particular issue with that. Something we intend to do with enough funding is pay developers to literally do nothing else but churn out unique alien flora/fauna/characters. We absolutely do not want the galaxy to be empty and boring to explore, so augmenting the official content with player-creations is definitely very appealing.
A couple of points: 1) the Control for Down should be below Up. 2) Have you considered using Space Engine's data for planet formation? Great project, please keep up the wonderful work you are doing.
Thanks! The controls are analogous to that of aircraft, where you push forward to pitch down and pull back to pitch up. Space Engine is definitely something I find very inspiring, and the goal is to have a galaxy with at least as much detail (plus actual life). We'll be generating our own data though, because then we've got full control over making tweaks and additions.
That's definitely on the roadmap, but it won't be for quite some time and it's going to need more development resource. To begin with we'll be focusing on highly detailed surfaces viewable from orbit, along with the gameplay associated with that.
Will there be any need to align to a certain Heading or direction before entering warp? Currently, it looks like you punch in a destination, and as long as the ship isn't on a direct collision course, warp can be initiated from any direction. I'm curious what the reasoning or explanation might be for that?
Yes, right now the spatial coordinates aren't implemented so it doesn't care which direction you are facing. We're working on that at the moment, and as you'd rightly expect you will need to orient the ship to the target direction in the final version. If you check out our Discord server we're posting daily updates on the progress of the game :)
@@StarshipSimulator It's more the issue of having a star just outside the window blinding everyone on board, though I assume there would be dimming tech or something to block out or dim the effect to protect people's eyes. That and a tiny drone could just park on the edge of a window and relay everything the bridge crew is doing to an enemy. It's just sensors and viewscreens would be more practical and versatile than a plain old window.
Wonderful! Can't wait to see the volumetrics on the planets. Question: is the altitude measuring from the center, or the surface? If I put in 500km for Jupiter will it put me inside the planet or 500km above its outer surface?
It's from the surface, so it takes the given planet's radius and adds however many km you want :) If you were to set it to 0km you would literally arrive at ground level, but it's hard-limited to a minimum of 100km (karman line, edge of space). Eventually it will be intelligent enough to adjust to each planet's respective karman line.
Just my .02 buckazoids... But I wouldn't have a "warp" animation. I would just show the stars and planets moving past the ship as it flies through space... Oh, and if you misjudge the distance, can you crash into a planet?
When the actual navigation system is properly fleshed out, plotting a course around objects will be one of the jobs performed by the Helm role :) We want a lot of those tasks to be fairly manual, otherwise the guy sat at the helm spends a lot of their time not doing much.
They are truly that size in the game world, although the physics simulation is actually scaled down and running invisibly in the background because of floating point issues. Thankfully when we move to UE5 in the future that will no longer be an issue, and we'll have truly seamless and continuous 1:1 scale star systems.
@@StarshipSimulator Makes sense to use UE, trying to do space games in Unity is a major pain in the ass. Good call guys and all the best, I hope we all get to play it one day :)
I'm very interested in seeing what you are going to do with the control UI. Also, in terms of customization, will you have different bridge designs rather than just that stock, maybe ones inspired by Trek perhaps?
The Helm controls will be fairly expansive, with buttons and sliders to control everything you'd need. Tweaks to RCS thruster strength, ability to go full newtonian, that sort of thing. The bridge as it stands in the video is actually going to be completely overhauled, along with most of A Deck in general. Same general aesthetic, but with a more sensible layout and a lot more detail. I hadn't actually considered being able to swap out the bridge module as part of the customisation, but it's a good idea and I'll have a think about it. We do need to be careful with regards to Trek though, because the game is already in that ballpark and we don't want to risk the ire of CBS lawyers.
Right now you'll just plow through the planet like it's not there, but in the future your ship will explosively pancake on the surface. The solar system generation tech does have support for a virtually unlimited number of moons already (and even moons of moons), but the code to spawn them in the correct locations is still a work in progress. They'll make an appearance soon enough though :)
haha, Headless Claire has been a thing for a while. This is a side effect of having to hide the head bone on the default skeletal mesh when in first person (otherwise it clips with the camera). When we switch the player to use a proper mesh that won't be a problem anymore :)
I'll have to do a video on this because it's a question we get asked a fair bit, and really there's isn't a single answer. The game will be quite different depending on which role you choose to perform on the ship, but in a nutshell it's about serving as part of the crew while exploring uncharted worlds and making as many successful first contacts as possible. Along the way you'll be upgrading your ship through researching flora/fauna/artefacts that you find on your travels, and there will be some hidden dangers lurking in the darker corners of the galaxy.
@@StarshipSimulator I didn't mean individual mission like what's there to do as a crew member, I meant to say what IS there to do as a ship, what is our objective, what are we working for, you know? Aside from exploring is there anything else that we're supposed to do as a ship?
@@Vlad-pc2rw The lore of the game is that you are on mankind's first ever deep space exploration mission. Humans have never left the Sol system before, so the mission of the ship is to see what's out there, and by extension make successful first contact with alien races. The Captain role for example will be faced with multiple choice dialogue upon meeting a new race, and the outcome of that will determine if they are friendly, neutral or hostile towards you. During your travels you will be able to enhance your ship through research, enabling you to return to places that were perhaps too difficult initially. The overall goal, and the thing that will count for completion (and some achievements), is successfully bringing the ship back home to Earth in one piece having travelled far and made multiple successful first contacts. Some aspects of the ship won't be fully repairable, so it's down to the judgement of the captain to decide when to return to Earth. As a crewmember, you will be supporting the ship and her mission in ways relevant to your chosen role. Engineers will look after the ship's hardware, a medical officer will look after the crew's physical health, the Captain will make all the decisions, the Helmsman will pilot the ship, etc. It's quite a complex scope, so I think I'll focus the next dev video on answering those questions so people have a better understanding of what the game will be all about :)
Oh for the love of Christ please hurry to get a playable demo for us lowly plebs. I do hope you can factor in the mega lighting storms of Jupiter on the dark side.
Outstanding work by you and your team, again! As a retired aerospace engineer, I'm well impressed by the attention to detail you've all put into this. Even some of the 'out there' sci-fi has a ring of plausibility to it, Dr's. Michio Kaku and NDeGT would be proud.
Well done and subbed.
This really an incredible project, pretty much my dream scifi game that I thought was too in depth to ever actually get made
Thanks! That is very much true for us as well. I grew up playing the Elite (and similar) series through the 80's and 90's, but as much as I love those games they've never offered the true experience of serving aboard a fully realised starship. Multiple decks, hundreds of rooms, and with all ship systems fully simulated. It's like being given the keys to a fully working starship and being allowed to go wherever you want with it :)
Good progress and quality work so far! My hopes for a Space Age space exploration game like this would include a space station orbiting Earth and a Mars station and social hubs as well both ground based and in space. I am not expecting a Star Trek themed game but something along the lines of a peaceful exploration centered on discovery and socializing in a mature setting in a utopian future game world. 😊
thank you for including pluto
I really liked how the NPCs appeared to be enjoying, and reacting to what was going on outside the ship. Very nice touch. By the way, the size of the fonts, at least in the helm station, are about what I need to be able to see. I know this is from a long time ago, but that's a good reference for you to go by, for establishing a reasonable accessibility feature for low vision users. Thanks for the video.
Loved that planetary scale comparison there at the end! Questions:
1) The sun from Mercury didn't seem as bright as I would have expected. Have you considered allowing the sunlit areas to get visibly blown out (exposure-wise)? It would be cool if the windows had to have that classic sci-fi "window shade" tint effect applied to them to compensate. Similarly, perhaps accentuate the dimming of the sunlight further out (including on the outer hull and planets), with the windows again able to compensate by enhancing the apparent light levels?
2) Will warp travel between planets need to take into account gravitational pull? I.e. will the travelled path be a curved path, or a straight line?
3) Will it eventually be possible for players to import custom 3D models of, uhm, _other_ starships, to have out in space? I.e. not for them to be flyable, or with interiors or anything... just the external hulls, perhaps inserted into orbits, etc? If so, what tools will be required to get a 3D model into the game?
Hey, thanks for the questions :)
1 - The lighting in Unreal Engine is a bit of a balancing act, because if you use the true Lux values with auto-exposure then in order for the view outside to be reasonable, then the inside of the ship becomes pitch black. Polarization of the windows is definitely something I'm considering, but it's not quite as straightforward as it sounds because there are windows all over the ship and directionality is a factor. We need to ensure the starfield remains visible when looking away from a light source.
2 - The travel between planets and star systems will be linear, because when you fold space you form an event horizon around the skin of the warp bubble. Spacetime (and therefore gravity) behaves very differently under those conditions. Essentially the ship is completely isolated from the flat spacetime outside of the bubble, existing on its own spacetime island.
3 - There will be a lot of customisations options built into the game, for example the ability to change UI-screen colours, carpet colours, the ship name, registry, etc. In the future we also hope to build some form of mission-scripting tool for the Steam workshop as well. It would also be nice to give players the ability to import their own custom meshes for alien species as such, but that's fairly distant on the radar. In reality I imagine third party tools will likely crop up before anything official, but as long as they don't break the game we'd have no particular issue with that.
Something we intend to do with enough funding is pay developers to literally do nothing else but churn out unique alien flora/fauna/characters. We absolutely do not want the galaxy to be empty and boring to explore, so augmenting the official content with player-creations is definitely very appealing.
A couple of points: 1) the Control for Down should be below Up. 2) Have you considered using Space Engine's data for planet formation?
Great project, please keep up the wonderful work you are doing.
Thanks! The controls are analogous to that of aircraft, where you push forward to pitch down and pull back to pitch up. Space Engine is definitely something I find very inspiring, and the goal is to have a galaxy with at least as much detail (plus actual life). We'll be generating our own data though, because then we've got full control over making tweaks and additions.
Will planet fall be available?
That's definitely on the roadmap, but it won't be for quite some time and it's going to need more development resource. To begin with we'll be focusing on highly detailed surfaces viewable from orbit, along with the gameplay associated with that.
Will there be any need to align to a certain Heading or direction before entering warp? Currently, it looks like you punch in a destination, and as long as the ship isn't on a direct collision course, warp can be initiated from any direction. I'm curious what the reasoning or explanation might be for that?
Yes, right now the spatial coordinates aren't implemented so it doesn't care which direction you are facing. We're working on that at the moment, and as you'd rightly expect you will need to orient the ship to the target direction in the final version. If you check out our Discord server we're posting daily updates on the progress of the game :)
That Mercury flyby perfectly illustrates why bridge windows are a bad idea.
I'm pretty sure that pancaking into a planet would be a pretty bad experience with or without windows :P
@@StarshipSimulator It's more the issue of having a star just outside the window blinding everyone on board, though I assume there would be dimming tech or something to block out or dim the effect to protect people's eyes. That and a tiny drone could just park on the edge of a window and relay everything the bridge crew is doing to an enemy. It's just sensors and viewscreens would be more practical and versatile than a plain old window.
I wonder how long Claire has to work for you guys to finally get a head :-D
Too long :D
Wonderful! Can't wait to see the volumetrics on the planets. Question: is the altitude measuring from the center, or the surface? If I put in 500km for Jupiter will it put me inside the planet or 500km above its outer surface?
It's from the surface, so it takes the given planet's radius and adds however many km you want :) If you were to set it to 0km you would literally arrive at ground level, but it's hard-limited to a minimum of 100km (karman line, edge of space). Eventually it will be intelligent enough to adjust to each planet's respective karman line.
@@StarshipSimulator Awesome thanks :)
4:00 Come on Navigator.... its is NOT "Ok..." it is "Aye Aye Sir! Course Plotted!"
Just my .02 buckazoids... But I wouldn't have a "warp" animation. I would just show the stars and planets moving past the ship as it flies through space...
Oh, and if you misjudge the distance, can you crash into a planet?
You should have the ship auto tilt when you enter warp with an object (planet) in the pathway.
When the actual navigation system is properly fleshed out, plotting a course around objects will be one of the jobs performed by the Helm role :) We want a lot of those tasks to be fairly manual, otherwise the guy sat at the helm spends a lot of their time not doing much.
@@StarshipSimulator That's fair.
It freaks me out that Claire has no head but she can still speak?! 😱
Magic :P
Am I the only one that wants to know what happens if you shoot the bridge's 3D projector?
I actually want to know what happens if you shoot a window out?
Will the bridge decompress and suck everyone out into space?
How did you get the planets to look so big? Second camera pointing on a tiny planet? How did you get the lights? Maaaagic.
They are truly that size in the game world, although the physics simulation is actually scaled down and running invisibly in the background because of floating point issues. Thankfully when we move to UE5 in the future that will no longer be an issue, and we'll have truly seamless and continuous 1:1 scale star systems.
@@StarshipSimulator Makes sense to use UE, trying to do space games in Unity is a major pain in the ass. Good call guys and all the best, I hope we all get to play it one day :)
I'm very interested in seeing what you are going to do with the control UI. Also, in terms of customization, will you have different bridge designs rather than just that stock, maybe ones inspired by Trek perhaps?
The Helm controls will be fairly expansive, with buttons and sliders to control everything you'd need. Tweaks to RCS thruster strength, ability to go full newtonian, that sort of thing.
The bridge as it stands in the video is actually going to be completely overhauled, along with most of A Deck in general. Same general aesthetic, but with a more sensible layout and a lot more detail. I hadn't actually considered being able to swap out the bridge module as part of the customisation, but it's a good idea and I'll have a think about it. We do need to be careful with regards to Trek though, because the game is already in that ballpark and we don't want to risk the ire of CBS lawyers.
What happens if you warp with a planet still in front of you?
And where are the moons?
Right now you'll just plow through the planet like it's not there, but in the future your ship will explosively pancake on the surface. The solar system generation tech does have support for a virtually unlimited number of moons already (and even moons of moons), but the code to spawn them in the correct locations is still a work in progress. They'll make an appearance soon enough though :)
@@StarshipSimulator moons with moons????!!! 🤯
Why has Claire no head? Is this the same in reallife or just ingame? 🤨
But so far it looks really nice.
haha, Headless Claire has been a thing for a while. This is a side effect of having to hide the head bone on the default skeletal mesh when in first person (otherwise it clips with the camera). When we switch the player to use a proper mesh that won't be a problem anymore :)
I can't wait until this game comes out, but what exactly will the game's objective be aside from traveling from planet to planet?
You will have a rle on the ship, Engineer, Captain, Science officer, Pilot etc
I'll have to do a video on this because it's a question we get asked a fair bit, and really there's isn't a single answer. The game will be quite different depending on which role you choose to perform on the ship, but in a nutshell it's about serving as part of the crew while exploring uncharted worlds and making as many successful first contacts as possible. Along the way you'll be upgrading your ship through researching flora/fauna/artefacts that you find on your travels, and there will be some hidden dangers lurking in the darker corners of the galaxy.
@@StarshipSimulator I didn't mean individual mission like what's there to do as a crew member, I meant to say what IS there to do as a ship, what is our objective, what are we working for, you know? Aside from exploring is there anything else that we're supposed to do as a ship?
@@Vlad-pc2rw The lore of the game is that you are on mankind's first ever deep space exploration mission. Humans have never left the Sol system before, so the mission of the ship is to see what's out there, and by extension make successful first contact with alien races. The Captain role for example will be faced with multiple choice dialogue upon meeting a new race, and the outcome of that will determine if they are friendly, neutral or hostile towards you. During your travels you will be able to enhance your ship through research, enabling you to return to places that were perhaps too difficult initially.
The overall goal, and the thing that will count for completion (and some achievements), is successfully bringing the ship back home to Earth in one piece having travelled far and made multiple successful first contacts. Some aspects of the ship won't be fully repairable, so it's down to the judgement of the captain to decide when to return to Earth.
As a crewmember, you will be supporting the ship and her mission in ways relevant to your chosen role. Engineers will look after the ship's hardware, a medical officer will look after the crew's physical health, the Captain will make all the decisions, the Helmsman will pilot the ship, etc.
It's quite a complex scope, so I think I'll focus the next dev video on answering those questions so people have a better understanding of what the game will be all about :)
@@StarshipSimulator Thank you very much for taking the time to write all that! Im excited for the game to come out.
Star Citizen 2
Oh for the love of Christ please hurry to get a playable demo for us lowly plebs. I do hope you can factor in the mega lighting storms of Jupiter on the dark side.
Working as fast as I can! :D I would guess at the current rate of development, a demo is about 2-3 months away.
@@StarshipSimulator Just a hint my birthday is mid January, turning 69. Just a polite hint, no pressure meant, really no pressure, ok just a little.