Hello everyone,

so I'm grondilu, I live in France.  I'm the same grondilu you could find on Wikipedia, IRC via freenode, forum.nasaspaceflight.com and probably lots of other websites because I spend quite a lot of time on internet.

I'm not much into gaming, as I don't even actually own a decent gaming PC (I'm never confident in buying one because I only use laptops and netbooks under linux and buying such a machine with a linux-friendly graphics card is not really easy).

But even if I'm not much into gaming, I sometimes look for neat FOSS games that can run on my PC.   Several years ago, I stumbled upon Celestia.  I was quite impressed and that renewed the interest I had about space and astronomy when I was much younger.   Unfortunately I realized that the development of Celestia had pretty much stopped, and I was disappointed because I could see elsewhere some new techniques that could have been used to make a 3D virtual universe.  Among those techniques were : procedural generation, fractal landscapes, voxels...

So I tried to look for alternatives to Celestia.  First there was "Spaceengine", which looks absolutely stunning but is not free sotfware.   Then I learnt about Outerra, and a "round-planet" minecraft-clone called seedofandromeda.  Still not free software.  I was getting worried.

Meanwhile, I also got into Virtual Reality and the upcoming Oculus Rift.  This lead me to learn about space sim games, such as the upcoming Star Citizen.  I was not into space sim games at all, but then I realized that what a space sim game does is quite close from what Celestia does, especially considering that with modern computing power, space sim games can have the luxury of showing an astronomically and physically realistic environment.   So I paid more attention to space sim games, which caused me to learn about the upcoming Elite: Dangerous.  I did not know about the Elite series, but I discovered it.  Most especially I discovered the FOSS remake:  Oolite.

Then I learnt about Frontier and its FOSS remake  Pioneer.  Was amazed to realize that Pioneer actually works on my machine, and it is getting quite close from what I was looking for initially :  a 3D astronomical software with procedural generation of planetary surfaces.

So now I have big hopes that the ultimate game I hope to see one day will be done.   To me, this ultimate game would be:

One: as realistic as possible.  It should use existing catalogs, and add to them procedurally generated content, but it should always be possible to know what is real and what is imaginary.  It should also be accurate on physics and lightning (stars should disappear whenever a very bright object is in the field of view).  Also: Newtonian physics, even if that's much less fun for space fights.  No hyperdrive either.  What's the point of going far away if anyone can pop up at any time?  I mean, at some point the concept of distance loses its meaning if people can travel at infinite speed.

Two:  multiplayer.  For a space sim game with newtonian physics, Frontier has shown that this is not fun.  Too much time to go from point A to point B, and the multiplayer aspect makes it impossible to forward in time.   I say:  so be it!   Players would have to accept the fact that to go from on point in the solar system to an other takes time.  Even if it takes weeks or months!   That means that the game would be limited to the Solar system, and I think that's just fine.  You could visit other stellar systems and galaxies, but you would have no interaction with the environment or other players.

Three:  sandbox.  I want to be able to build stuff on planets or on space stations (I want some big ones, and I want O'Neil cylinders).  People who don't want to go in space, for instance because they don't like the idea of waiting weeks during interplanetary travel, should be able to play the game on Earth, in a gameplay that would look like Minecraft's, SimCity's, GTA's or something like that.   Different planets or continents on planets could even have different gameplays.

That was my wishlist, and that's how I'll end this self-introduction.

Regards,