Pali Posted May 19, 2014 Report Share Posted May 19, 2014 Any other space sim fans here? I've always been a big fan of them, being just barely old enough to remember the original Elite where white polygons on a black background were the height of graphics and a 22kb game somehow had multiple galaxies of hundreds of systems. Well, the creator of the original space sandbox is continuing the concept through crowd-funding, providing a game world that has a 1:1 scale galaxy to play in - literally 400 billion star systems, including 160,000 in the real night sky visible from Earth and the rest being a procedurally generated galaxy based on rules consistent with current astrophysics which will be updated as new real-world star systems are better examined. Real physics apply to flight, to the point where with the "flight assist" mode turned off (my preferred style of flying thus far, though I'm still rather bad at it) if one pitches up, one's ship will continue to rotate in that direction until a counterthrust pitching downward is applied. Imagine starting in Earth orbit. You engage your supercruise drive and throttle up to a hundred C or so, cruising past Mars and Jupiter to circle Saturn's rings, maybe dropping out for a moment to dodge through the rocks making them up for fun, before looking up, picking the center star on Orion's belt, and either engaging hyperdrive to jump there instantly OR, if you don't mind letting your computer run on it for a couple of days, just remaining in supercruise at about 2000xC and letting your ship traverse the distance. The galaxy itself is the sandbox here, and while I expect that the best way to play will be the semi-MMO setting involving all other players who are on that setting, you are free to have a galaxy shared only with friends or purely yourself vs the AI if you desire. The basic concept is that you start with a ship, a few credits, and a galaxy to play in however you choose. Trade, smuggle, pirate, bounty hunt, explore, just enjoy the view... choice is yours. The galaxy map, current as of the alpha build a few days ago, which does a nice job I think of showing off the galaxy itself. A player attemping to supercruise through the rings of a planet - the dropout is not ideal, but I expect being an alpha build it will be improved upon. A 20-minute video exploring some of the basic mechanics, flying around a bit and a bit of combat. The current hyperdrive jump from system to system, which I think is cool enough to merit its own video. Game website. I'm looking forward to Star Citizen as well, but that's at least a couple years off - this is planned out by the end of the year. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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