SpaceSimCentral

Thanks Pinback the motion of the relative velocity marker feels much more natural this way:
chose not to use actual "gates" to avoid a confusion with the ones used to materialize the orbital paths already. Also the velocity along this track is much smaller (= Vship - Vstation) and this made gates a bit too bulky... to my taste at least!

Nice one DC looking forward to seeing more in the new year.

Hello SSC,Another nerdy vid about flight planning... This will be a very important aspect of the gameplay. Typically when going on a mission to a location with no refueling possibilities it will be vital to evaluate the return trip ahead of time. This will let you know what maneuvering room you have before hitting the bingo fuel limit to get back. And failing to properly prepare will put you at risk of getting stranded in space with little hope for a rescue... safe!

Great vid DC, any thoughts on what happens if you find yourself stranded in space, like a distress beacon.

Posted by: @pinback Great vid DC, any thoughts on what happens if you find yourself stranded in space, like a distress beacon.Hi Pinback, I think that "bingo fuel" problems should generate many interesting situations (and the player could be either the rescued or the rescuer by the way).But yes the first step is being able to send a "mayday" indeed. There are no FTL comms though (the "mail" is carried by traveling ships), so if you get stuck in an empty or hostile system your fate will depend on someone previously knowing of your whereabouts (planned mission / flight plan...) so as to know where to send the help. From within an inhabited system it will be a matter of setting your comms units properly - typically for maximum range and in the correct direction with line of sight to a station or satellite - no big deal.Then the outcome will depend on the difficulty to reach you. In the most common situations you will have made it back to a stable orbit around the destination body, just lacking the juice to reach a station and dock there (note: add a "just get to an orbit around that planet!" option to the auto-planner ^^). In such cases a ship will rendez-vous with you to transfer the necessary hydrogen and all will safely fly back to the station... Not your finest hour but s**t happens
However the more "further and faster" away you are the smaller the fuel quantity the rescuer will be able to carry. To a point where only your crew can be saved while the ship will be lost. Then you'll lose whatever upgrades you had installed and this will likely not help with your career... :/

Posted by: @d-c-elington

indeed. There are no FTL comms though (the "mail" is carried by traveling ships)


You know I had completely forgotten about that aspect as most games just ignore it, "mail is carried by traveling ships" reminds me of the paper & pen RPG Traveller.

Posted by: @pinback
"mail is carried by traveling ships"

Yes I'll see how this unfolds! But generally speaking IMO it's always very interesting to try and extrapolate the effects of such rules on the game world, see if they may bring interesting gameplay elements and feel consistent with the project as a whole.

 IIRC the mail ships in Traveller were just a cockpit and jump engine with some fuel tanks, with just enough space to carry the mail and small high vale items. Also I seem to recall that they need a tender to pick then up and launch them, could make for some interesting mission around the ships. 

Oooh I just caught this. Like the ideas presented here, I'll be keeping an eye on this.

Must admit I had only really thought about the "electronic" mail actually! And that's why there's a dedicated "Interstellar Data Network" channel in the comms units. As for the related gameplay I was planning to offer a little reward for bringing fresh data to a new location. Nothing complicated: just taking the time to connect and download the latest information upon departure and uploading it on arrival. Also of course some outposts will likely be very isolated but I'd say that carrying the news to them would be part of their normal resupply routine, nothing special here.
What could be more interesting is a situation requiring to race against time to bring a critical piece of information somewhere. I'll think about it.
But yes "small packets" make sense indeed because it's actually large ones that don't in a universe where mass is critical. It's much more economical to "print" some equipment at a location than carry it in a ship that requires 100 tons of hydrogen and 1M? credits in Helium-3 only to refuel.

Hi SSC,
Besides shopping for my elderly neighbors the best I can do is stay home and work and so here is a new video about the in-game electronic checklists. Hopefully this should make the learning curve slightly less "astronomical"!

Stay safe,
David

Wow... @d-c-elington, you are putting your isolation time to good work here. This was a nice video that covered your controls and how they worked, I take it as you become familiar with the control panels and its systems you could just interact with the controls directly and not have to use the popup windows? But it was definitely nice to see the interaction with the popup selections and watching your HUD systems respond or the popup recognize that the correct controls have been interacted with. Very nice work, I am sure this took a long time to get this entire HUD working properly with all of the systems and their effects on other systems depending on their state.
Personally I didn't know the windows speech engine was that far along it actually sounds good and I am sure that is a lot less work for you to generate all that audio.

Hi D1 Posted by: @sscadmin
I take it as you become familiar with the control panels and its systems you could just interact with the controls directly and not have to use the popup windows?

Definitely: the popups are totally optional. Otherwise I'm afraid that the one for the maneuvers would become rapidly annoying. The previous system to help with the flight sequencing ("advisory log", much quieter) is still in place and the checklists synchronize themselves on its messages actually.
About the speech synthesizer: yes there was a significant improvement between Win7 and Win10, and I think it's just the right amount of robotic for such a use! Also the English voices seem to be installed on all systems (they were on my French version) and technically the dedicated .NET API made it quite easy to create the sounds in a clean way (on a parallel thread with storage in a re-usable buffer) and play them through the game's audio layer.

Awesome work DC keep it up

Thanks @pinback, switching to the creation of a proper game world (capital-planets, colonies, outposts, rim worlds etc...) and then to the NPC traffic.

Hi SSC,
Here is the quarterly dev log video
To sum-up the galaxy now features some inhabited stellar systems at last, and they are connected by a network of refueling stations along the main shipping lanes. Going on with the procedural approach the main planets were chosen scanning the database according to a set of habitability criteria. And in a similar way the support facilities were placed where the route-finder wanted them. That nicely generated a few big hubs and lots of lonely places. And so hopefully this should help alleviate the "sameness" issue.

At the moment the main development goal remains the NPC traffic. However as I was spending trillions of in-game currency units into shiny GPS constellations it felt too much of a pity not to make them operational. So I will now take a little detour to overhaul the ship's navigation sensors and add some positioning errors to begin with.
Fly safe!

Looking good, DC! X-Ray Pulsar Receivers? I like it!

Posted by: @cody
X-Ray Pulsar Receivers?

*ahem* that may sound a little more flashy than what it really entails!
But at long last the ship won't know exactly where it is anymore - as it should be. As far as I can tell this will spice up the navigation a little bit:
- having to be more careful with course corrections: would be a pity to spoil a perfectly legit flight path based on inaccurate sensor readings,
- needing to fiddle with the on-board radios to use the local navaids when available (it's GPS but at long range this will require picking the individual satellites),
- and with jumps: having to determine the required radius for the "hyperspace bubble" enclosing the ship in advance. The jump-point must enter that sphere at some point for a successful jump, and so the larger the bubble the more relaxed the flight accuracy requirements. However it takes about 8 hours to "charge" that volume, and the larger it is the more the strain on the jump-drive and electrical system...

Awesome work DC love the detail in the map, just something you do not get in a lot of games today.

Posted by: @d-c-elington
But at long last the ship won't know exactly where it is anymore - as it should be.

That gets my vote! I was aware of NASA's nav system, but didn't know it was called SEXTANT - sweet!