Thanks for mentioning it. Looks fun, I may check it out.
That said, here is my generic complaint for space games: could people please start making games where planets are the size of, well, planets? Or even 1/10 of a planet (like in Kerbal Space Program), but something that still reflects the sizes and distances of things in space?
I suspect the reasons these games don't are twofold: firstly it's difficult technically to get an engine to deal with such large scales effectively, and secondly it's hard to make the gameplay work around such differences. (That said, EVE has had realistic scales for space for a while, and star citizen is boasting about their engine which can handle such scales, though whether that will actually turn into a game is yet to be seen)
This is one of the things I immediately liked about Factorio: the scale feels right. A sprawling factory feels like things are far apart. I have to use the car to drive around it, or use trains.
Stellaris sort of gets this right. In a galaxy, the navies can take a game year or more to make a journey. But planets just feel tiny, and "pops" can immediately teleport from one planet to another even if the navy would take a year to make the trip.
Yes! That's what I love about Factorio. The world scale is right for its setting (even if mines could use a scale-up). Trains, when I first saw them, blew my mind completely.
Stellaris is a funny example, because I feel it has the reverse problem - the scale of the map is somewhat right (even if the galaxy is ridiculously small), but the speed of the game makes it hard to feel. On top of that, intra-system scale is completely wrong, and planets, as you said, feel super tiny. Also most planets are completely useless.
It would be fun - even if out of scope for Stellaris itself - to see a similar game where the solar system view is more of a schematic map, but planets actually orbit their Sun, and were real-scale - i.e. you could zoom into them Celestia-style. And see your puny little orbital habitat, with a huge Earth-sized planet in the background. Slow down game time to wall-clock rate, and you could almost imagine your empire's citizens living there, seeing what you see through the windows of their home. And perhaps you would then turn your camera towards flashes of light far beyond, knowing they come from a space battle millions of kilometers away.
It would be just a gimmick, but wonderfully immersive.
Yeah, timewarp is crucial for this to work. But, looking at Dyson Sphere Program, space scenes seem to be already operating under a timewarp (which is implicit in the scaling factor).
Modelling a whole solar system may be tough - planets are really big, and really really far away. But I think that, at the very least, a moon system would work. A central planet with half a dozen moons of varying sizes. Moons can be small and much closer - but they'd be still three or four orders of magnitude greater than what we see in most space games.
Not with max max speed on, but probably max you can afford without life support & electricity simulation mods breaking and killing your crew, if you're using those :).
have you ever tried space engineers? distances are still very compressed, but there are whole planets and it genuinely takes a long time to get places. the physics is very wonky though...
there is also a "speed limit" which is one of my own major pet peeves in space games. there are mods to remove it, but this is very much at your own peril.
Space engineers is awesome but the physics intensive nature of it prevents it from having large scale servers.
A lot of the amazing vehicles I have seen on Youtube are ultimately pointless because the player population on a server is never high enough to justify them.
I'm actually doing a bit of that work in my spare time :). Over the years, I've been coming back to this one question: how to make procedurally generated content immersive?
You need procgen to create truly large game universes. But I haven't seen a single game where procedural generation would create an immersive world. Or even an interesting one[0]. In all the games I played, I've seen one or both of the following immersion-destroying things:
- The mechanics are plain obvious. You see a few examples of a generated thing, and it's trivial to guess the pattern and know what you can expect in the future[1].
- There's no story. Stuff is randomly generated, but doesn't make sense. Creatures drop loot they don't use, or shouldn't even have, lore-wise. Dungeons are arranged at random, with no sense of purpose for the layout. Quests are closed loop, with no meaningful impact on anything else in the world.
The closest I've seen to an immersive procgen game is Rimworld, where if you squint just hard enough, you can live the story of your colonists. But if you open your eyes just a bit, mechanics still stick out like a sore thumb.
As an interesting data point, one of the most immersive experiences I ever had with fiction was throwing story prompts at GPT2/GPT3 and going along with the AI narrative. I think it's partly because mechanics of GPT3 are too complex to guess, and purpose/story pieces itself together from correlations in the training dataset. But textual medium also helps - you have to imagine things, and there are no visual inconsistencies to spot.
Right now, I'm casually exploring if the two points above - mechanics and story - couldn't be improved if the models used to generate content were much more complicated in causal sense: instead of few dice rolls, one could build deeper causal graphs and work with probabilities conditional on particular game state. That, and making enough randomizable parameters to ensure the categories aren't obvious.
(If you know of any game, in any genre, that you feel does procgen right, I'd like to know the titles. I'm also on the lookout for related scientific literature.)
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[0] - Case in point: Kerbal Space Program. Planets and moons are big (1/10th the size of the real things). You can go anywhere and it "feels right". But there's hardly anything to do once you get there. You could, as I tend to, install mods for extended base building and resource mining, but there's only so much fun you can have with it, and the physics engine goes out of its way to make establishing large bases impossible. Celestial bodies in KSPs are very much like checkboxes. After you get there, and tick the "been to $body" checkbox, there's no reason to stay there.
[1] - Example: Starbound. There are random quests, but they follow the same obvious pattern. Find a non sequitur something or someone somewhere, bring it to quest giver, for a non sequitur reward. There are random critters and weapons, but you can quickly tell the categories that are being randomized, and there isn't much variety in those.
I wonder if this kind of idea, to scale the time of a game to last tens of years could be an experiment that would inspire people to participate.
The game need not run on the original platform till end and the game could possibly evolve over time, but the actions of original players should have ever-lasting consequences.
Just a weird idea that popped into my head reading your comment.
I had this idea for a browser space exploration MMO where the universe would be large, in the sense that there's a billion stars on the map, and players get spawned in relatively small area of it (which expands as more players join). Entire such galaxy would be traversible (albeit slowly), there would always be somewhere further out to go, and at the same time, everything players do is permanent. When a player decides to abandon the game, their constructs become ruins and derelicts for others to find. The admins would be in-universe Q-like[0] deities, and all admin actions would be in-game (e.g. banning someone would involve throwing a rock at their homeworld, or detonating their home star).
Scale-wise, I'd like to make such game reward studying and building up your home solar system, vs. expanding everywhere.
On my list of ideas for such a game was also another thing I miss from most games: diverse and possibly unbalanced tech trees. No "rock paper scissors", no Pythonesque "there's one way to do it". For instance, there are at least three main types of FTL travel in science fiction: linear warp drives (ships can exit or change course at any point along the way, and can be intercepted and attacked during FTL - as in Star Trek), wormholes/starlanes (travel takes time, but you can't arbitrarily change course, or often even pick your destination), and jump drives (it takes time to spool up the drive, but the jump itself is instantaneous; see BSG). I'd like all three to coexist within a single universe, on equal footing, but with different mechanics and tactical implications.
Writing this makes me feel young again :). As a kid, I think I had a list of such ideas written down somewhere.
That said, here is my generic complaint for space games: could people please start making games where planets are the size of, well, planets? Or even 1/10 of a planet (like in Kerbal Space Program), but something that still reflects the sizes and distances of things in space?