onlycliches
New member
Afternoon Folks,
I'm an avid space nerd, I put countless hours into Orbiter back in the day. I remember being surprised the Space Shuttle couldn't reach orbit with infinite fuel!
KSP has been lots of fun too, the ability to throw rockets and space planes together is incredibly fun but it's too simplistic in many ways! (who else wishes for a vertical speed indicator in KSP?)
I've been finding that there's an itch I haven't been able to scratch with either of these (also tried Simple Rockets 2 for a while, it's surprisingly inaccessible and frustrating).
Being a software developer, I've started piecing together my "dream space sim", and the more I think about it the more I want to make the darn thing.
I'm nowhere near writing actual code, just still throwing ideas around to see if it's worth doing. Here are my current (work in progress) goals/ideas:
All of this to say, if there were a magical "Orbiter V2" on the horizon what would you want included in it? I'd love to get feedback on the current idea list and anything you'd like to see in a potential clean sheet build of a space sim.
FAQs:
1. You know this is a huge project and will likely take years to accomplish, right?
Yep.
2. Why don't you just (some combination of KSP, add-ons and fiddling)?
Cause I don't wanna. Also KSP will never run on Linux, macOS, iOS or Android.
I'm an avid space nerd, I put countless hours into Orbiter back in the day. I remember being surprised the Space Shuttle couldn't reach orbit with infinite fuel!
KSP has been lots of fun too, the ability to throw rockets and space planes together is incredibly fun but it's too simplistic in many ways! (who else wishes for a vertical speed indicator in KSP?)
I've been finding that there's an itch I haven't been able to scratch with either of these (also tried Simple Rockets 2 for a while, it's surprisingly inaccessible and frustrating).
Being a software developer, I've started piecing together my "dream space sim", and the more I think about it the more I want to make the darn thing.
I'm nowhere near writing actual code, just still throwing ideas around to see if it's worth doing. Here are my current (work in progress) goals/ideas:
- Not going to use Unity, Unreal or Godot. I'll write it in Rust.
- Be truly cross platform (Linux, macOS, Windows, iOS, Android). Recent software libraries have made this pretty easy.
- Implement soft body physics, calculated on the GPU. Obviously it wouldn't be as detailed/complex as Beam NG, but similar idea. This one is kind of a stretch goal, I think mobile GPUs are possibly in a place where you could pull this off, but maybe not.
- Orbital physics with fedelity in the same ball park as Orbiter 2016.
- I really like KSPs "throw parts together" mechanic, and I also really like the procedural parts from Simple Rockets 2. I'd like to combine these ideas with two separate build environments:
- "Construction": More complicated than Simple Rockets 2 builder, allows you to create aircraft/spacecraft with control down to the polygon level. If you were making a Falcon 9 in this system, you'd make each stage as a separate spacecraft.
- "Integration": Similar to KSP's builder, except even simpler. You'd have a selection of mostly built rockets / space craft you could combine, then launch.
- I really like Orbiter's MFD system, I'd probably extend it by allowing folks to write MFD add-ons in javascript.
- Native add-ons are a bit tricky, with cross platform support you'd have to compile each add-on for every platform. Add-ons via scripting with LUA or JS would be easy-peasy though.
- Graphics? Damnit Jim, I'm a software engineer not an artist.
- Lots of other stuff I can't remember right now.
All of this to say, if there were a magical "Orbiter V2" on the horizon what would you want included in it? I'd love to get feedback on the current idea list and anything you'd like to see in a potential clean sheet build of a space sim.
FAQs:
1. You know this is a huge project and will likely take years to accomplish, right?
Yep.
2. Why don't you just (some combination of KSP, add-ons and fiddling)?
Cause I don't wanna. Also KSP will never run on Linux, macOS, iOS or Android.