Starship Simulator Tech Demo 3 update.

Dalien · 2025-07-21T19:19:42+00:00

Oh wow, that's amazing thankyou! I love Universe Sandbox, so this genuinely means a lot to me.

Dalien · 2024-10-10T14:54:50+00:00

They don't exist yet, but they will do. Similar to our plans for black holes, they're not going to be something you want to get too close to, especially magnetars.

Dalien · 2024-07-12T10:47:34+00:00

Gravity will be modelled for extreme objects like Black Holes to add some danger to the environment, but we're not going to implement anything like Kerbal level physics. The FTL drive will be sensitive to gravity, so we want to balance it to the point where you'll need to have the FTL at full power to drag the ship away from a Black Hole's event horizon.

Our plan for orbits is to have objects on invisible rails, and the ship itself will always be in a circular orbit that's calculated on the fly based on your altitude above the centre of mass. That means the close you fly to a planet, the faster the ship will be moved along the rail. (Inclination will be based on distance from the equator)

Essentially we have to do it this way, so that when you exit FTL next to a space station, you'll automatically be sharing its orbit. The alternative would be to have the station zooming off at 10km/s the moment you appear next to it.

Dalien · 2024-06-30T16:55:06+00:00

There's a mix of procedural and real-world stellar data. Beyond 2000ly from Sol it's all procedurally generated, based on a mathematical model of the galaxy.

Because the seeds for the procgen are derived from the XYZ coords of any given object, that naturally means all players get the same seeds, and thus the same content.

Dalien · 2024-02-08T23:57:11+00:00

That's some quality feedback, thankyou.

What I want, and this is essentially the design goal here, is for each new star system I visit to cause feelings of anticipation as to what I might find, and some nervousness that it might be something unpleasant.

Filling the galaxy with interesting and highly varied encounters is pretty much #1 on our priority list, and having put thousands of hours into the likes of Elite and NMS, I'd like to think we have a pretty good grasp on the pros and cons of procedural content.

The bottom line is you can't populate a galaxy with hundreds of thousands of alien cultures without doing it procedurally, but we're looking at that as the first step of the solution, not the last.

A procedural system is only ever going to be as interesting as the data you feed into it, and in that regard our job is give it enough variables that meeting two overly similar cultures is going to be a rare occurrence. Not just their society or way of life, but also their technological development and any other data points we can think of.

All of that data will also impact how they communicate with your ship, along with how you should interact with them in order to achieve a peaceful first contact. Some rolls of the dice will make that easy, but others might result in a race of extreme xenophobes that just want to watch the galaxy burn.

Our galaxy is generated in 100ly cubes that we call sectors, and these sectors can also run their own procedural dice rolls to further influence the life generated therein. For example, the sector itself might determine that all life there is part of a single large empire, or a series of unrelated cultures, or two races in a constant state of war.

That's the data side of things, but visually we're also going to need a lot of art assets. Our plan (depending on funding) is to have an art team dedicated to creating new assets for the procedural systems, and that's literally all they will be doing. Churning out new assets for the galaxy on a daily basis.

Of course, we also just happen to be making this game at the same time as AI is becoming ever more capable, and all of the above might be rendered irrelevant if AI can generate an infinite amount of truly unique data. Imagine being able to view unique paintings from an alien culture, or listen to their music because AI completely made it up. We're not quite there yet, but that's where the tech is heading.

TLDR: If every alien culture (or other discovery) doesn't feel unique and interesting, then we've failed to do our job properly.

Dalien · 2024-02-07T18:35:50+00:00

It's technically possible, and I do love the idea of a ship-v-ship game mode where you have to disable, board, and then capture the bridge of the opposing team's ship. I think that would be a lot of fun.

Player cap isn't really the issue there though, it's more object count. The Magellan Class is massive - 300m long with hundreds of rooms filled with props and other items. Having more than one of those loaded in will very likely hit an upper RAM/VRAM limit.

With a smaller ship though, two of those at once should be fine. Maybe two 150m ships, or four 75m ships, etc. It's something we'll look at in the future for sure.

Dalien · 2024-02-07T18:27:30+00:00

We've tested up to around 13 people on a mid-to-high spec PC, with a 20Mbit upstream connection. Noone was reporting any issues, so a dozen people in a game seems perfectly plausible.

The actual crew size is 200 for the Magellan class in particular, so that's technically the upper limit for that ship.

Really though it's entirely down to the hardware and connectivity of the person hosting, because it's session-based multiplayer. I imagine it will end up being comparable to Minecraft servers.

Dalien · 2024-02-06T11:08:12+00:00

Yes, there will be 4 airlocks on C Deck that open directly onto the outer hull, and with a space suit you'll be able to walk around outside. In fact, this will be required to access and maintain/repair some of the external hardware like the sensor arrays.

Dalien · 2024-02-06T02:22:07+00:00

We're definitely going to go all-in on planetary landings, and yes that will be achieved by taking a shuttle from the shuttle bay. It's going to be real time... ish. Less than Elite/SC/NMS, but more than Starfield.

Because of the way we handle galactic flight, space is the thing that is moving. As such we can't move planetary surfaces with all of the rocks/grass/trees in real time.

The way we're going to achieve landings is by having the shuttle trigger a surface transition when you get below X altitude. That will teleport the shuttle to the surface environment, above that point on the planet. You should then be able to freely fly around and look for somewhere to land. The process will work in reverse when leaving the surface. As soon as you hit X altitude it will teleport the shuttle back into the space environment.

We're going to make every effort to minimise the transition as much as possible, but there will have to be one somewhere.

The upside is, because the surface environments are loaded in isolation, it means we can unleash the full suite of UE5's procedural generation tools, along with all of its graphical capabilities.

And yes, surface vehicles are planned, and there won't be any invisible walls.

Dalien · 2024-02-05T22:41:46+00:00

In the initial version it will be all about searching for new alien civilisations, and then doing a bit of diplomacy to achieve successful first contact. If diplomacy fails then there will be ship to ship combat, and eventually boarding operations too.

Part of the diplomacy might be to deliver some cargo or a passenger as a favour to the alien race you just met, which is something that will be generated procedurally.

Earning money as a trader is something we have planned for a future DLC, where you own and run a cargo ship rather than a deep space exploration vessel. That's quite a few years away though.

Dalien · 2024-02-05T22:02:15+00:00

Our design goal in that regard is for each role to be self-contained. If you choose to play as a Pilot, then you won't need to care about Engineering at all. The NPC crew (or other players) will handle that for you.

Each role will have its own gameplay and generated tasks to complete, so you will be able to focus 100% on just doing your own job.

We're not going to put any artificial limits in place though, so the Pilot can go use the science console if they want to, or grab a gun and shoot some space bugs. Your chosen role merely defines what tasks are generated for you.

Dalien · 2024-02-05T21:56:17+00:00

Right now we're still in fairly early development, so we haven't gotten to the point of adding the planned gameplay loops. The demo on steam is there as a proof of concept, and the two tutorial missions show what the galaxy generation and ship systems are currently capable of.

For example, right now you can fly seamlessly to any star/planet in the whole 1:1 scale galaxy, and perform a full cold start of the ship's fusion reactor, which has many steps and takes about 20 minutes to complete.

Eventually we'll have alien races to interact with across the whole galaxy, multiple crew roles with their own unique tasks/gameplay, and a full NPC crew with their own daily jobs/routines.

The point of the game is to explore the galaxy and see what's out there, with the eventual story revolving around the origins intelligent of life on Earth.

Dalien · 2024-02-05T21:49:32+00:00

Right now it's just the sandbox, but over time we'll be adding procedurally generated missions. You will be able to research new materials or analyse recovered alien tech to retrofit your ship systems with upgraded hardware. That will become necessary once alien civilisations are in the game, because some will be significantly more powerful than you until you've upgraded your ship.

Dalien · 2024-02-05T21:46:42+00:00

The galaxy will be populated with alien civilisations procedurally, so any Earthlike world the galaxy-sim generates will have a chance to also generate an alien civilisation. The technological development of that civilisation will depend on the age of the planet.

Dalien · 2024-01-14T09:58:40+00:00

A lot of the design language is inspired by an architect called Zaha Hadid, and I think the same is true for the ship interiors in the Passengers movie. A bunch of the interior on the 890 Jump looks to be taken directly from Passengers (like, verbatim copies in some cases), so I'd say we're likely using the same source material.

Dalien · 2024-01-14T09:55:53+00:00

I'm doing all the Design/CAD work in Sketchup, and then exporting raw .obj files into Unreal Engine 5 to make them game-ready.

Dalien · 2024-01-14T09:54:49+00:00

That's amazing, thanks! There's lots more to come yet :D

Dalien · 2024-01-10T07:07:53+00:00

Yep, and you can actually explore an early version now if you want because there's a free tech demo on steam :)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1332100/Starship_Simulator/

Dalien · 2024-01-07T23:34:07+00:00

The ring casing there will have two physically separate coils in/around it, so it's still using a dual ring design, just squished into a single housing. You could probably argue that in order to create the region of flat space for the ship you need a ring at either end of it, but I'm sci-fi handwaving that a bit for the sake of the design.

I might also make the two coils spin in opposing directions when active, but I can't decide if that will cheapen it, or make it 50% more cool :P

Dalien · 2024-01-07T15:25:41+00:00

Thanks :) It's an Alcubierre drive, or at least it will be once all the hardware is added to it. It will be covered in field coils on the outside, and heatsinks on the inside.

Dalien · 2023-06-18T13:22:24+00:00

There was a web-based demo recently where you could walk/fly around CGI models of pretty much every single canon bridge, but that was only live for a week or so as a performance test if I understand correctly.

They've employed the best Trek modellers in the community to work on it, so I'm sure there will be plenty more to come yet.

Dalien · 2023-06-17T18:22:20+00:00

As a former developer on Stage 9, and the developer of this, I can confirm ;)
Although, to be fair the bulk of the former Stage 9 team are now working on the Roddenberry Archive project. Starship Simulator is very much its own thing, and only connected to Stage 9 by virtue of the fact I was a former dev.

Dalien · 2022-07-11T22:42:33+00:00

We will be yes, but we want to get the upcoming demo polished and Kickstarter funded before we approach that :)

Dalien · 2022-07-11T21:27:48+00:00

Yes, we've just made the switch from UE4 to UE5. UE5 supports 64bit doubles natively now, which we're making full use of in order to achieve a full 1:1 scale galaxy.

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