On Co-operative Starship Simulators

I don't even think I need the "I love space and space travel and space exploration" preamble at this point, so I'll forgo more than just that meta-introduction.

Nope, I'll do it anyway. It's important. I love space and space exploration and space travel. I crave the experience portrayed in shows like Star Trek, Star Wars, Firefly, and Battlestar Galactica. I love the single pilot ships from Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, and Firefly and I also love the multi-crew ships depicted in those same shows and Star Trek. I like the idea of barking orders at a group of people or having orders barked in my direction. I like the feeling of camaraderie as multiple individuals work towards a common goal.
Now, there have been single-pilot games for decades. The X-wing series from Star Wars, Wing Commander, Freelancer, etc, all help to slake the thirst for that space feel. Some of them even allow for multiplayer co-operative modes, which is pretty fun. However, for a long time there was no game that captured the feel of being an officer on the bridge of a large ship. A year or so ago I found a game called Artemis: Spaceship Bridge Simulator which promised that experience. You and 5 friends all take different roles on the bridge of a starship. Each of you sits at a networked computer depicting a bridge console, so it's a sort of live-action roleplaying game. Someone acts as captain, someone pilots the ship, someone fires the weapons, someone manages the communications, and someone acts as ship's engineer. Proper cooperation between all 6 members of the crew is important to the survival of the ship and the completing of the mission. I played this with my friends several times and always had an enjoyable experience.
Even more impressive than the game itself is the fact that the developer is one man, working alone in his spare time.
The game is a bit...limited, however. Gameplay is done is what is commonly called "submarine 3D", meaning your vessel can only turn left and right and change the "height" above or below the neutral plane of battle. The arena is MUCH shorter than it is wide and long, and the vertical component of the motion feels more like a gimmick than a tactical option. The arena is quite small, being only 100km to a side. It takes a minute or two to cross the arena at full warp, which means that warp speed is around 1200 km/hr, or Mach 1, which is pretty slow in space. The graphics aren't fantastic and the gameplay is limited. Users have the ability to script missions in HTML, but the scripting language is similarly limited and doesn't allow for robust use of variables or complex functions. The main mode of the game is an invasion mode where a certain number of enemies spawn and try and destroy space stations. There are settings for the match that can help to make for different experiences, but in general the game is basically the same each time. That's not necessarily a bad thing and there is a dedicated fanbase that loves the game, but for me it's not quite enough.

Today I found a game that's still in the alpha stage but already looks amazing: Pulsar: Lost Colony. Similarly to Artemis, it's a co-operative spaceship simulator where each player plays a different role on a starship, but it expands on the idea by quite a bit. First and foremost, the game is played from the first-person view. The player maneuvers a player character through the interior of a fully-modeled ship, complete with hallways, doors, crew quarters, lounges, and system rooms. Interacting with command consoles allows the player to control the ship. The ship maneuvers through 3D space with 6 degrees of freedom. Players can teleport down to the surface of planets to explore and gather resources and information. Apparently you can also teleport to an enemy ship, kill the crew, and take control of the ship. This means that you might have enemies teleport aboard your own ship, at which point you'll need to repel the boarders. Character permadeath is a feature. The ship has a system that creates a new body for any crewmember that dies, which I assume means that the player loses any skills or bonuses gained during the course of the game. If the cloning system is destroyed and all player characters die, the game ends and the save files are deleted. On starting a game, a galaxy is randomly generated so each new game is a new experience.

Basically, it sounds fairly fantastic. From the early alpha gameplay videos there are some interface choices that I don't really like, but in general, this game looks amazing. It contains plenty of elements that I wanted Artemis to have, all wrapped in universe that is visually appealing and, at least on the surface, quite compelling. Here: have some screenshots and videos!

On Planetary Exploration

Not real planetary exploration, unfortunately, but a game to which I was introduced by a good friend. The game is called Planet Explorers and, though it's still in the alpha stage, it's already incredible.

Now, some background on me. If you've read a certain post on here, you'll know that I love Terraria. I love exploring, finding resources, obtaining said resources, and using them to make new things. I also the sense of openness even though there is a sort of progression line. Now, Terraria is a 2-dimensional game, of course. Minecraft was the closest analogue to Terraria in the realm of 3D games, but I just couldn't handle Minecraft. I didn't like the aesthetic, I didn't like the controls or the lack of structure, and I couldn't play it for very long.

Enter Planet Explorers. Like Minecraft, Planet Explorers uses voxels, which are basically 3D pixels, except that Planet Explorers' voxels aren't cubes. Take a look at this picture of the landscape

As you can see, there are no cubes in sight. Let me try and explain voxels. Most everyone understands pixels, which are basically little points of color on a 2D grid. Voxels are basically the same thing, but in 3D. If you imagine a sheet of graph paper where every junction between lines is a point in space, and each point can have a "color" or some other attribute, you basically get the idea. Voxel-based landscapes are nice because you can create overhangs and caves and things that are impossible using a heightmap. They're also nice for mining games like PE or Minecraft, because each separate voxel can be a different material, similar to Terraria's block structure. The difference between Minecraft and PE is how they handle connections between voxels. Let's go back to the graph paper example.

Assume that the different colored dots represent different materials. We have PE on the left and Minecraft on the right. In this first image there are no connections between voxels.

In this second image we have connected the voxels. In Minecraft on the right, connections can only be vertical or horizontal, whereas in PE the connections can be made at any angle. The engine calculates the slope based on the location of all adjacent voxels and fills it in. This leads to more natural-looking terrain, as can be seen in the in-game screenshot above.

So, the aesthetic is much more pleasing to me, just from the first impression. Gameplay is basically identical in a lot of ways. You move a character around a world, gathering resources, chopping down trees, digging up dirt and iron and other materials, building houses, crafting tools and weapons and armor and the like. However the experience in PE seems MUCH better than in Minecraft. For starters, there are NPCs that offer quests that help the player learn to play and use the interface. These quests feel as natural as a hidden tutorial can be, and generally fit into the setting, which is that of a spaceship full of explorers that crashes on an alien planet. It's often difficult to combine mouse and keyboard movement of a character with a point and click interface, but by binding rotation of the camera to the right mouse button, Planet Explorers manages to create a functional interface.

Now, not everything is perfect, of course. It's difficult to differentiate between materials, for starters. A lot of the stone and iron and limestone all looks more or less the same. As much as I hate the cube aesthetic of minecraft, it did make it easy to tell which  and often I would dig out a chunk of stuff without adding anything to my inventory. This seemed relatively arbitrary, but it might have been occurring when I dug up a section of a slope that wasn't large enough to be considered an entire voxel but instead was filling the empty space between adjacent points. I'm not sure.

Then again, this is an alpha, and the free download isn't the latest version of the alpha, either. I'm extraordinarily impressed with the quality of this game so far. In the 0.5 alpha version there are 3 gameplay versions: Story, Adventure, and Multiplayer. I've only tried the story mode, but from what I can gather the adventure and multiplayer modes are identical with the difference of the number of players. Adventure mode seems to be more sandbox-esque, where you have access to all crafting recipes and are free to just do whatever you want.

Another cool aspect of the game (which is quite unique, in my opinion) is the ability to generate your own custom crafting recipes. This utility plays similarly to a simplified 3D modelling program, where you basically sculpt a sword, gun, vehicle, or whatever you want. The program calculates the required materials, the weight, damage, etc of your final design, and then allows you to export it to the "real" world. It's a pretty fantastic aspect to add to the game, especially if people want to make a sword that spirals around and has tons of spikes sticking out at weird angles like I did. Eventually you can build complex vehicles with weaponry and everything. The interface takes a bit to learn, but once you've got it, it's quite powerful.

Bottom line: Planet Explorers looks and feels incredible already, and I've only tried the early alpha version. For $22 you can pick up the early access on Steam and get the 0.7 alpha which includes a lot of new features.

I'll leave you with this video. Enjoy!