Space Nerds In Space

[smcameron]

Short dev update for mid-August 2018:

[theAntiBob]

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

[D.C.Elington]

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

[smcameron]

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

gaseous-giganticus repo: [url]https://github.com/smcameron/gaseous-giganticus[/url]

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

[Pinback]

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

[D.C.Elington]

Yes kudos for the great work indeed ^^
And thanks for the presentation, the "gradient to curl to velocity field" slide makes it appear almost "simple"! Again these textures you come to are just amazing.

[smcameron]

By the way, there are now bootable x86-64 Arch linux live ISO images with Space Nerds in Space pre-built here:

[url]https://gitlab.com/MCMic/snislive/-/jobs/artifacts/master/browse?job=build[/url]

So if your friends don't run linux, you can slam that ISO on a bunch of flash drives and they don't need to install linux.

[smcameron]

A bit of game play from last night at the local hackerspace:

[D.C.Elington]

Great!
About the gameplay there are many people on the bridge ^^ so is the workload evenly balanced across all stations?

[smcameron]

Some stations are more fun than others. Navigation and weapons are probably the most fun. Science isn't too bad, but it's basically scanning, which is selecting ships (so navigation can know where they are, and so weapons can know what phaser wavelength will be effective). Comms is kind of weak, mainly involves receiving messages from mission scripts so the crew knows what's going on/what they're supposed to be doing, and communicating with starbases and the ship's mining bot, and controlling what's on the "main screen" (The captain can request any screen in the game be mirrored by the main screen, and the comms guy can make this happen.) Comms also has access to type in commands to the ship's computer, which via (somewhat sketchy) natural language processing, can make the ship do almost anything. (One time, after playing for a few hours and people were leaving, one guy stuck around and attempted to limp his nearly dead ship back to a star base using only comms and the computer -- which was a kind of interesting and spontaneous apollo-13 like scenario -- which was also doomed, because I don't think it's possible to dock with a starbase using *only* "the computer", -- though it probably should be.) Engineering and damage control can be kind of frustrating. There's purposely not quite enough power and coolant to go around and run everything at the same time, and then when things get damage, stuff stops working quite right, and you're scrambling around trying to drive/drift a repair robot around in the engine bay to repair all the systems and figure which one is most critical, and meanwhile the ship is likely being shot at and it could all end at any instant.

So... like I said, some stations are more fun than others. Dividing the duties up among stations like these bridge sims do is obviously somewhat artificial, as obviously there are plenty of space sims where no such division exists and single-pilot ships function just fine. And you *can* play this game solo, switching between stations as necessary (though it's nowhere near as fun doing it that way.) Don't know if that answers your question.

[D.C.Elington]

It does thanks. I would say that this is not really an issue since all players can always discuss the strategy out of the sim, or maybe even roleplay as a crew why not ^^
Maybe another possibility would be to add "mini-games" at stations where the interaction is too streamlined? About comms: constantly having to evade jamming for instance?

[smcameron]

Just cruising around, looking at stuff.

[D.C.Elington]

Besides the planets I really like the NAV and SCIENCE stations too!
Is it me or there's a bit of stuttering in the external view? I didn't notice that in your previous videos though.

[smcameron]

Maybe the stuttering is because I recorded on my desktop which doesn't have an SSD, and also I added some stuff into the atmosphere shader lately. With OBS running, maybe it can't quite keep up now in all cases. If OBS isn't running it seems fine though.

[D.C.Elington]

Ah yes I've noticed the effect with the video capture too. Did you record with a 60 fps target? IMHO a half refresh rate is OK for a video.

[smcameron]

No, I was running the game at 30 fps. It was only recently that the game can even try to run at 60 fps (surprisingly to me, it seems to work ok at 60fps, mostly, though there are a few things that don't behave quite right because some bits of code for various slerping times, etc. still assume 30 fps. I fixed most of them, but there are still a few around.) My desktop system just has intel integrated graphics also, probably with a better GPU it would be fine.

I have an issue for tracking things I've noticed at 60fps.
[url]https://github.com/smcameron/space-nerds-in-space/issues/207[/url]

[D.C.Elington]

I'd say that on integrated graphics the frame rate you achieve is quite good actually!
About your 60 fps issues I read your posts but in my experience fps and sync problems are very specific and complex so I would rather refrain from venturing silly or obvious ideas! What I can say is that I've caught myself ignoring the actual measured elapsed frame time information for quick and dirty per-pass recursive filters sometimes. So in my code I would search for such issues. Another one I recall is mixing the "elapsed frame simulation time" and the "elapsed frame real time": could happen if you have a time acceleration feature.