There are many great space sims out there. Some feature beautiful ship interiors, some have stunningly realistic galaxies, and others have impressive simulated ship systems. There's even software that allows you to soar through the cosmos seamlessly without any loading screens, but what the space sim genre lacks is a title that features all of the above. Until now, that is... Demo: steam.starshipsimulator.co.u… Discord: discord.gg/eDSQvpgdUX Ko-Fi: ko-fi.com/starshipsimulator ( You can also buy the Kickstarter tier rewards here) #spacegame #VR #gaming #pcgames

We weren't lying when we said that we wanted Starship Simulator to be as scientifically realistic as possible.😅 👇 Where tectonic activity exists, the tectonic plates now drive the terrain. You get mountains pushed up where plates are colliding, and trenches where they are pulling apart or subducting. You'll also notice island chains along subducting plate boundaries. Surface biomes are also now implemented, driven by the planet's climate model. Again, none of this is actually textured yet, we're just working on the generation and structure. The different coloured areas in these images represents the surface composition, which along with the climate model will determine things like plant types, rock type, soil type, etc.

I've been hunkered down and busy working on the terrestrial surfaces for Genesis. I'll do a stream on this soon so you can see it all in detail, but for now here's some screenshots of various terrain features. It's all procedural, and quadtree-detailed all the way to the surface. It's worth noting that this is the same terrain we'll be using for planetary landings, just with additional detail noise and rocks/foliage/etc. None of these planets have textures yet, I'm just working on the structural geology.

Celestial Motion - All stars, planets and moons are now in motion, orbiting their respective centres of mass. They are in proper orbits, with orbital resonances, accurate rotations and tidal locking where relevant. This is a big milestone. Ship Orbits - Your vessel will now automatically be captured into orbit around celestial objects. When you approach a planet and exit FTL, the direction of your ship's nose will determine your orbital direction. You'll be placed in a perfectly circular orbit, and your orbital velocity will be accurate for your altitude. You are free to fly towards/away from the planet at sublight, and the orbit will update in real time. If you fly perpendicular to your orbit, the orbit's inclination will change accordingly. Station Orbit Sharing - This is the big one, and it makes pretty much everything else in the game possible. If you exit FTL next to something that is already in orbit, then you inherit that orbit regardless of your nose direction. All objects near one another are pooled and their physics states are moved together along the orbital track. As such, ships can fly around stations and one another, while also moving sideways at 7km/s. Essentially there are three physics layers for space travel. Celestial motion, orbital motion, and local motion. The celestial layer moves the planets, the orbital layer moves ships/stations along an orbital path, and the local layer allows ships to fly around freely while shooting projectiles at one another. All seamless, all invisible to the player. I can't overstate how much of a big deal this is. This means we can now add alien stations, other ships, creatures in space, or literally anything else that's orbiting something else. From here we can start building content!

I know the demo is taking quite a while for this update but we are getting there. We needed to recreate the entire galaxy (Genesis), so that needed to take a little while. It has put us many months ahead in development, and we have some amazing things (scientifically!) in game now. 👇 The whole formation process from end-to-end is now fully simulated, including galactic metallicity regions, circumstellar disk formation/composition, disk evaporation, planetesimal formation, pebble accretion, orbit clearing, planetary collisions, moon formation (including collision events), gas accretion, planetary migration, and kuiper belts. O Class stars for example evaporate their circumstellar disks very quickly, stunting planetary formation, while M Class stars have much longer lived inner disks, resulting in rocky worlds crowding their inner regions. Each class of star now forms class-accurate systems. The net result of this is that gas giants are far more rare around lower mass stars, while A Class stars for example have a penchant for forming many Ice Giants. We also have multi-star systems now, which was actually an interesting solution to a too-many-gas-giants problem. We were capping gas giants at 13x Jupiter's mass, but once we removed that cap we found systems created brown dwarf companions more frequently, and gas giant distribution fell to match the peer-reviewed numbers. And of course we now have real constellations, as you can see from Orion in the attached screenshot.

🌞🌞

Flying into a Gas Giant (Volumetric Depth Layers Test) Gas giants are where you'll skim your fuel from in Starship Simulator, so we're keen for that experience to be epic every time. You'll also be able to fly down a few layers into the gas giant's atmosphere, because science! Each layer gets progressively darker and more fluid-like as you descend.

Testing our new volumetric atmosphere and cloud system being illuminated by two different stars at once in a binary star system. youtube.com/watch?v=fiRR4uke…

☁️☁️☁️☁️☁️

Testing our new volumetric star tech. Stars in the game are now full 3D objects, not just textured spheres. With endgame shields you will be able to fly into stars, for science or for a tactical advantage. We're working to expand this tech to create fully volumetric gas giants, which starships will be skimming to collect gaseous fuels. youtube.com/watch?v=7VFanIBG…

We've been working on our first Shuttle design on streams lately, so we thought it would also be a good time to also start building a proper PID flight controller for both in-space and atmospheric flight. Here's a bit of info about that: While in space the flight model is fully newtonian, and the flight controller translates control inputs to RCS thruster firings. It does this based on thruster direction, so we can arbitrarily place thrusters around a vessel and the flight controller will handle the control mapping. It also has some autopilot functionality built in already, and is able to use the RCS thrusters autonomously to keep the vessel on target. In-atmosphere, the Shuttle uses 4 landing thrusters in a manner very similar to a quadcopter. The handling feels a bit like flying a drone, with the addition of some main engines to provide horizontal thrust. The PID controller always tries to maintain a stable hover, so if you flip the shuttle upside down and take your hands off of the controls, it will use the landing thrusters to flip itself over and zero out its vertical velocity. Everything is using real physics and real thrusters, so damage to a single thruster can immediately be felt in the handling. This also means every vessel will feel unique, because its handling profile is driven by its centre of mass and location of individual thrusters. Our goal with the flight model is for it to feel meaningful and grounded in real physics, while also being approachable for non flight simmers. To that end we'll have some flight assist modes that smooth off some of the sharper edges. We'll share more on this when the system is more fleshed out!

Whenever I'm having a tough day, I just rewatch NerdCubed play our game 🤣🥰🤣 and I always feel better 😂 youtube.com/watch?v=gJ5Oou-J…

Come watch Dan do some shuttle work! youtube.com/live/VsBikut3mxI

Great video Sirius Sims! Thanks :) youtube.com/watch?v=J7nPGyeg…

Thank you, @ObsidianAnt youtube.com/watch?v=QsRTYG_A…

Development Build 0.227.0.21 𝗡𝗲𝘄 / 𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗲𝘀 • Added some very simple reactor controls to the Engineering station on the Magellan's bridge. • The Caravella Class is now completely flyable and has functional NPCs on the bridge. ( Available for Rear Admiral+ ) • Upgraded Unreal Engine to version 5.7.4. • On stream - Started building the A Deck bathroom on the Magellan Class. Not Yet Implemented • Created a more stable version of the sublight flight model with a fixed centre of mass. • Created a modular thruster component that simply takes in Max Newtons * Throttle as an input. Optimisations • Created a new optimised light component and converted the temp lights around the ship to use it (the round ones). • Enabled stereo and foveated rendering for VR. 𝗙𝗶𝘅𝗲𝘀 • Fixed the Caravella Class not loading. • Fixed bug #02752 - Open/Close Refill Valve buttons on new bridge engineering screen have typo • Fixed bug #02788 - Flying Camera shadows • Fixed bug #02753 - Chat Spamming • Fixed bug #02787 - Engineering Bridge NPCs are mislabelled • Fixed bug #02757 - Power Starship Simulator Portal • Renamed the Bug Ticket Severity fields so that they're more reflective of actual game issues. • Added the ability for players to set the Severity field directly when raising a bug ticket (we'll refine as-needed). • Added automated screenshot capture/upload when raising a bug ticket (you can opt out). Captain+ Notes • Upgrading engine versions always brings with it the potential for unexpected side effects, so please let me know if anything is behaving strangely. • VR is working much better now, but enabling stereo rendering has caused some side effects. Not least of which, if you have Bloom enabled, it will cause the right eye to have glitchy black areas all over it. Also, right now there are no in-game menus in VR, so once you are in-game you will need to hit Alt+F4 to exit. • I've been testing both Wired and Air Link on my Quest 3, and they both seem to work fine. Typically, I'm seeing ~60fps on my 4090 on Medium settings. • Unreal Engine 5.7 forces us to use the AgX Tonemapper over ACES, because the OpenColorIO plugin is required by MetaHumans. Ultimately, this is a good thing; it gives us more accurate colour and better visuals, but until I tweak the post process, it's going to look a little flat.

Internal Development Build 0.227.0.20 New / Changes • You can now refuel the ship from the bridge! We don't have volumetric gas giants yet, so for now you simply need to be within 1.25-1.75 of a gas giant's radius to be in effective fuel scooping range. Ice giants are the best fuel sources, with effectiveness falling off on classes I through V. • Added a temporary /refuel command to the chat box to save anyone who forgets to watch the fuel tanks. It'll set the tanks to 10%. • Added a temporary (ish) flashing light above the Engineering console if any tank drops below 10% fuel. • The F1 bug reporting tool has been updated, and now also lists all open bug tickets in-game. More functionality on that will be coming. Fixes • Fixed bug #02613 Bug reoprt form too short • Fixed bug #02742 Floors aren't being cleaned • Fixed bug #01881 Feedback - Add audio in background when alt+tabbed Starship Simulator Portal • We've now replaced Mantis with our own proprietary bug tracker, built into the portal and the game. • You can now upvote bug tickets that you think should be a priority fix. • Anyone with an account can comment on bug tickets. Backers - Notes • The new bug tracker uses your Starsim account, so if you are logged in when you report a bug it will link that ticket to your account properly. You'll then be able to see any tickets you've raised on your dashboard, and it will glow yellow if any of your tickets have been updated. • The NPC Captain doesn't know about fuel scooping yet, so don't leave them unattended, or you'll end up stuck without fuel. For now, I'll add a temporary /refuel command to the chat box to save anyone who gets stranded.