Long time no update .. a codebase. https://geekygulati.com/2016/03/12/dotnetmud-spacemud-optimizing-network-traffic/ is when I talked about it last.
I was playing Starcom Nexus, and it reminded me that once upon a time i was playing with flying a ship around in gravity. I looked, it was 7 years ago. I cloned it, I updated it, I ran it. I was amazed.
I’m not going to kid myself with “I have time to work on this” .. but, if I did, what would I make? This is like “If I win the lottery”, giving space for some creative stuff to sparkle. I would have planets that (slowly, unrealistically) orbit their stars.
I would have planet and sun gravity that draw ships in
But the ships won’t crash against the planet. Instead, there will be a “autopilot” bump that happens that assists the ships into a non-crashing orbit over time. (so a few times they’ll go through the planet, but eventually would end up orbiting)
ships can do a “land” feature if they are close enough to a city, goes into an automatic “shrink into the planet” type of thing. At that point, the game switches over to text mode of having landed, getting out of the ship, n/s/e/w to visit whatever places.
At first i wanted real thrust type stuff. But that can be very unmanageable.
So make it manageable. Choose an object to travel to. Accelerates towards, the decelerates. Can be planetary. Can be a ship. Different levels of autopilot around this can be purchased. Fuel cost for the big accelerations, free small ones to prevent stranding. Standard given autopilot = bring self to a stop relative to object (so you can end up at your target)
But i don’t want acceleration to be good for interstellar travel. Not without putting in 10 minutes of game time or more. For that, i want a hypertravel mode, but with a twist:
In hyperspace mode, gravity is inverted at d^5 or something silly like that. So to send yourself to another star, you get close to your current star, switch to hyperspace, and get catapulted out that way. If you aim wrong you can still use your hyperspace drives to point yourself in some direction, but they can only slow you down or speed you up to some absolute value. (the stellar launch can exceed that value). spend more money for better vectoring and acceleration and maximum controllable velocity. You would learn about stellar launch the hard way, you could just go into hyperspace and start accelerating towards a star.
So you would theoretically line up against a star, go into hyperspace, get catapulted, get close, and if you did it just right you would get slowed down by the target star but if not you would drop out of hyperspace somewhere around your target star. You drop out of hyperspace only when your hyperspace velocity gets slow enough.
The rest of the game would be similar, i guess, to Starcom Nexus. You visit planets, you solve things, you get resources, you fight baddies, you mine stuff, etc. That’s the game built on top of the above. Except that planet visits are text adventures.
I’m writing this from a hotel in Phoenix, where i’m on vacation with my wife. Its only taken .. 2 days? of vacation time, to get my brain clear enough to where this stuff starts coming up for creativity. yay!
