Development update for March 2014:

Space Nerds In Space development update for April 2014.

The audio isn't sync'ed to the video, and the video runs out before the audio finishes, ... oh well.

Most notably, I've been getting into emulating some fluid dynamics stuff to try to get decent textures for gas giant planets. I've made some progress mostly by pursuing the ideas in this paper (PDF): Curl Noise for Procedural Fluid Flow by Bridson, et al.  My little experiments in Processing can be found here: Curly Vortex (github).

Here are what the results I have look like so far:

I'm doing the fluid sim on the faces of a cube map and it mostly works, but there are some discontinuities in the velocity field at the edges of the cube faces that I haven't been able to get rid of, so I am thinking I need to do the sim in real 3d on the surface of the sphere, then derive the cubemap images from the 3d data.  That will also make it easier to do things like add counter rotating flows for a more realistic pattern.  I've had some success in 2D with introducing bands of horizontal currents.

imgur gallery of 8 such experiments.

-- steve

I've had some success getting a 3D version of my fake fluid dynamics simulation working to produce seamless gas giant cubemap textures:

Gallery here

The code is in "gaseous-giganticus.c" in the Space Nerds In Space codebase on github.

-- steve

Added a mining system to Space Nerds In Space:

Got normal mapping working and some procedural generation of rocky, cratered planets.  Some new assets here: https://github.com/smcameron/space-nerds-in-space-assets

I'm very surprised that this hasn't received more positive comments it looks great!

I've also been working on a system in which players can travel between solar systems hosted on different servers via "warp gates".  It's still a work in progress, and hasn't yet been committed, and I still have quite a lot of work to do to get it all working the way I want it to, but I've got a proof of concept working.

What nice work so far. It will be interesting to see how the whole server customization element develops for Space Nerds. I really like the fact you are connecting to different player servers so it is possible for your experience to change from server to server.

What are your plans for reputation and fame when moving from server to server? Will players be able to create anything in the universe and will these be persistent after a person leaves a server?

I don't really have any plans regarding reputation and fame within the game.  The game is fundamentally a LAN game rather than an over-the-internet game, so arguably me implementing this multiple server thing is a bit silly, but it is an interesting problem, which is why I'm doing it.  As I mentioned, there's still a long way to go before I have it working well enough to commit the code.  As for players building things -- There isn't really any building of things in the way that minecraft or starmade has.  There is the gamemaster station which lets you place things in the universe, etc. There are some corner cases (what happens if a crew launches their mining bot out into the void, then takes a warp gate to another solar system?) and some technical corner cases some of which I know about, and some of which I probably don't.

The servers run independently of the clients, so, as long as the server is running whatever's in there that doesn't leave via a warp gate (and only player ships can do that now) stays there.  The servers do not (yet?) have the ability to checkpoint their contents (Lua scripts being one reason why not), so that's kind of a bummer, although you can sort of half-ass checkpoint some of the things.

Don't know if that answers your questions.

Been messing around with natural language processing types of things ...

More progress on the speech recognition front. I figured out how to give pocketsphinx a custom vocabulary which improves its accuracy considerably, and I wrote some code to convert written out numbers like "two hundred thirty eight" to "238" which enables a lot of things.

Incremental progress with the speech recognition.

Finally got around to implementing a 3D "demon" screen for Space Nerds In Space.

I have improved the planetary ring shader to make rings a bit more opaque and also to differentiate between the light and dark sides of the rings.  This is after spending some time looking at a nice video of Saturn's rings made from photos from the Cassini mission.  Below are two pictures, one showing the light side of the rings, and the next showing the dark side, back lit.  The back lighting effect could probably be improved further, but just increasing the opacity of the rings and distinguishing the light side of the rings from the dark side seems to me to be a drastic improvement.

Here is an album with even more if you like what's below: http://imgur.com/a/lrmmN

Here is a demo of the "Saving Planet Erph" mission script.

The script is here: https://github.com/smcameron/space-nerds-in-space/blob/master/share/snis/luascripts/SAVING-PLANET-ERPH.LUA

Small update.  Main new thing is a tow truck service has been implemented for those times when you run out of gas out in deep space, and an EMF detector added to the Comms screen to give early warnings about imminent attacks.

Been awhile since I've posted here. Lots of changes for Space Nerds In Space since last I visited, too many to recall really. Lastest thing is Space Monsters.

Hmm, not sure I remember how to post videos on this forum, and I don't see a preview button... Maybe it will recognize a plain link and do some magic.

Just a little update about what's been going on in Space Nerds for the last few weeks.

Here's a development update from July 27, 2018:

Short dev update for mid-August 2018:

The videos of the progress you've made on this is amazing... the gas giants are insanely impressive.
Incredibly inspiring, I love it!

Those gas giants are beautiful indeed! Thanks @smcameron for linking the reference article by the way.

Thanks theAntiBob and D.C.Elington. I made a little slide show about how the gas giants are made, and also I have put the gas giant program "gaseous-giganticus" into it's own github repo now.

Slideshow: https://smcameron.github.io/space-nerds-in-space/gaseous-giganticus-slides/slideshow.html#1

gaseous-giganticus repo: https://github.com/smcameron/gaseous-giganticus

Also, here's a half-hour long video summarizing the last 6 years of development on Space Nerds IN Space:

Great vid and that's an amazing amount of work you put into the game over the six years.