I tried the demo and I really liked it, especially when I found out how many freaking stars there were :D.
I´m interested how this game will evolve, with some more gameplay and all that good stuff.
Thanks for all the support, you guys. I means a lot, really.
I hope to make it so we can have even more stars. At the moment, all stars are spawned in at creation, and have their visible property set to True or False as they’re seen or not seen.
For worlds, they are only spawned in when their star is visited (so as to not have another 10,000+ objects running in the scene) and are ended when the star is left. If I did the same thing for stars (spawn them in when visible, kick them out when not), the scene would only have to run the stars which are visible, which in most cases is only going to be a small fraction of the total galaxy. If I did this, there would be no reason to not be able to effectively have hundreds of thousands, millions, or billions of stars in a galaxy. This is how I should have set it up in the first place! I need to re-work the FoV system (which adjusts the apparent luminosity of stars) once Colonies come online anyway, so I might as well go ahead and re-tool Stars while I’m at it.
It would take an ungodly amount of time to generate a billion-star galaxy, but if the data were then saved externally (what I plan to do eventually), that same pre-generated galaxy could be re-used over several games; with the ‘corpses’ of your previous games still present in the persistent galaxy. Sort of like how Dwarf Fortress allows you to generate one massive world map(which takes 30 min to an hour to do) and play several games across it, with the option to ‘reclaim’ lost Fortresses from previous games. You might only experience 0.0000001% of the whole world in one game session, but that only suggests that one could play 1,000,000 game sessions in the same world and still be able to discover new territory, as well as re-discover old territory. And that’s just in the first map they generate…
Procedurally-Generated Content. Stealing fire from the gods since time.time().
Some more update:
Some basic Traits have been introduced to World generation. Most of these are influenced by the Worlds evolution, environment and surroundings.
Tidal Friction: Caused by high-mass neighbors. Gravitational forces from passing massive bodies pull and stretch this World, causing geological activity to occur, even in cases where a World would otherwise be Geologically inactive.
Ancient Seabeds: Caused by worlds who at one point gain a Hydrosphere, but lose it due to various conditions (usually caused by extreme high geological activity, weak atmosphere).
Lost Atmosphere: Similar to Ancient Seabeds, this World at one point held an atmosphere, but lost it due to some past event (usually weak atmosphere which get blown away by strong solar winds).
Panspermic: At some point, some form of extra-terrestrial life found its way to the World’s surface, and is now part of that World’s Biosphere. Panspermia has the chance to give Worlds a Biosphere (albiet a small one) where normally life would have no business being. Worlds which share a system with other worlds that possess a Biosphere have the best chances of becoming Panspermic.
Anhydrophiles: (a made-up term, maybe there’s a real term for this) Often associated with Panspermia, this World seems to support forms of life which thrive without the existence of water. Given to Worlds which have a Biosphere, but no Hydrosphere.
These Traits could even become the focus of Research projects (if Research ever becomes part of the game). Maybe researching a World’s ancient seabeds could yield fossils which improve your research on Biology, or maybe you could discover a way to reverse whatever process made the Hydrosphere disappear, and use it to terra-form the World and bring back its water.
I think I want this to be a big part of the game play. This idea that the player can influence a World’s Spheres (for better or worse) through their actions, as a sort of passive long-term terra-forming mechanic. Altering one Sphere could set off a chain-reaction of Sphere adjustments, and lead to unexpected consequences as the player fiddles with their Worlds’ ‘Web of Life’. Players who abuse their Worlds might find that their Worlds eventually become dried-up lifeless wastelands that no-one wants to live on anymore. Take care of your World, and she will take care of you.
Been working a little on adding a second ‘twinkle’ layer to star sprites. These are just color-less versions of the regular (colored) sprite, but scaled to distance from the camera, with a small amount of random ‘wobble’ to make them sparkle a little. Distant stars will appear more as sharp pinpoints of light, rather than vague blobs of color.
Before and after shot. Left image is with no twinkle. Right is with twinkle.
Wow the thing with the persistant universe is a really great Idea. I´d like to see that 
I am dropping the second update for this today. It is not as far along as I wanted it to be, but now is the time to do it.
With the upcoming BGMC starting tomorrow, I will probably not be putting much work into this project for the next week. To be honest though, I look forward to the excuse to put this on the shelf for a bit and work on something different. Many projects (of mine) have died from a one-week absence, but I’m confident this little guy will hold out. He is starting to grow into not such a little guy any more…
That being said,
You can grab V15.5.2 RIGHT HERE (link will also be added to the OP)
(file size has almost doubled – we’re almost at 1mb!)
The controls have changed slightly. My hopes are they are more intuitive now, and need less explanation 
All instructions are included in the README though, so make sure you skim through that.
IMPORTANT CHANGES: “S” to spawn ships. Send ships with the “SendTo” button; change your current star with “GoTo” button. F10 will dump a txt file in the game’s parent folder with a list of (some) Worlds. Probably not useful to anybody but myself as a dev tool, but it’s there – and will explain if you have a cryptic text file magically appear in your game folder
You can also click on Worlds to center and zoom on them. Click on the world you’re targeting to un-target it and return to normal view.
Buttons are ugly, default BGUI frameButtons. Investing some time into learning how to use Themes will be in order, and these will becomes much better looking. But form follows function, and these function very, very nicely.
I have also changed the title of the thread to match the title of the game. This will either be much less confusing, or much more confusing to others. I haven’t decided yet…
Haha epic, the title reminds me of “no mans sky”. Propably intended
Work continues! My BGMC submission was more or less a total flop (although I made some neat toys out of it), so it’s back to the grindstone!
I’ve successfully converted all Star (python) objects as pure python objects. Now, star (game) objects are called and placed when they become visible, and ended (or never drawn) when they aren’t. This means two important facts are true, or getting closer to becoming true:
-Galaxy size limits can now be greatly increased! Whether you’re in a thousand-star galaxy or a hundred-thousand-star galaxy, the game engine is only drawing the hundreds (or thousands) of stars which are visible to you, rather than waste resources trying to keep track of the other 900,000 invisible sprites.
-The Core’s galaxy attribute (a list containing all Star info, which in turn holds all World info) is now all generic python code, which means it can be Shelved into an external file and recalled later. Saving/loading galaxies (persistent galaxies) are much closer to being a reality.
More to come. Stay tuned!
Cool! So, are you going for hard sci fi ships?
Hey this is looking pretty good! I love procedural games and the nice small download associated with them.
However, I must protest the folder being named differently than the zip. Adds an extra step in finding the extracted contents.
This project is still alive! The real world has left me with little time to work on this lately, so I have no updates at this time. Currently, the project is in a mild state of cryo-stasis, and will soon be re-awakened.
Rubbernuke: I’m not sure what you mean by ‘hard’ sci fi?
pftgs: Issue noted, and will be fixed in the next release. One of the perils of choosing such a long title, I guess
Hard sci fi means using ships and concepts that are as realistic as possible, and keep made up concepts to a minimum.
Example, kinetic weapons like rail guns are used for close up fighting, while other weapons like lasers are kept ‘real’ by doing thermal damage in a sustained beam (and not like Star Wars ‘pew pew’ style).
Well then yes, I will probably be taking the more ‘hard’ sci-fi approach. Although I’m not afraid to throw a bit of fantasy in there as well. It is fiction after all
I can’t really say how this is going to turn out aesthetically. I have no hard-set plans as to how this “world” works (which is a bad move on my part), so things could go anywhere. But, I would expect something more along the “hard” camp of sci-fi, as that is my personal preference.
Expect something more along the lines of (the newer) Battlestar Galactica, and less like Star Wars. I am a huge nut for Battletech (which is fairly realistic in its depiction) so there will probably be a fair amount of inspiration drawn from that canon.
actually there is such a thing as a pulse laser, where you dump a capacitor bank
into a oversize laser, so you can have a pistol with the equivilent beam strength of a much larger continious laser, however laser blooming is a problem in atmosphere, (plasma formation scatters the beam)
so in space any combination of pulse or continious is possible, where as in atmosphere you will either see a a array of smaller lasers under bloom strength converge on a target, or a pulse to form a fiber out of the air, followed by a an ubber laser dumped down the psudo filament.