… Well the post’s title gives a good summary of the work for close to five years. It may be too long a time before starting to document a very technical game but as they say “better late than never”! 🙂
The intent with the “Universe” pages is to present the game’s world and underlying mechanics. ASG is meant to be a regular spacesim with a ship to take care of, dynamic missions and a career. However orbital mechanics fully apply and the added hyperspace twist does not brake the fundamental ΔV (Delta V) metric. Also spaceships may be fusion powered but there’s still so much you can do with 50 GW¹…
To sum up: real orbits together with the on-board avionics to fly them, but no “E” shortcut for Engine ON/OFF and no pew-pew dogfighting! (with all due respect for the wonderful space games out there!)
At this point the ship is operational. Some systems are still missing but the overall multi-physics simulation and the power plant are in place. The flight controls and the master auto-pilot are OK. The latest addition was the automatic flight planner. I was really anxious about this one because it’s a critical component for two reasons. First it would not make sense that an interstellar spaceship would not be equipped with such a feature. In other words players should not need a degree in astrodynamics to play! Second it is absolutely mandatory to generate a realistic AI NPC traffic.
And so there it is: the ship can go anywhere but there’s currently nowhere to go. So the goal for the coming months will be to populate this empty galaxy.
Thanks for reading!
¹ I sure hope that no real-life spacecraft designer will see this! 😀
