Apogee - a godot space game


directive0

Very Active Member
Joined
Apr 8, 2015
Messages
840
Location
Toronto, Canada
I've been working on a little space game recently. Thought I'd show off my progress and solicit suggestions from the people here.

https://squaredwave.com/wiki/index.php?title=Apogee

In THIS THREAD folks gave me some comments. I'll respond to them here:

Okay FIRSTLY: Yeah all the ships are locked so they can't rotate on the X/Z and cannot move on the Y plane. So all the velocity and gravity calculations are done using Vector2s pulled from the origin of the transform of the 3d objects.

Second: So I agree that fuel should really only be consumed when accelerating. As of now they are working that way, HOWEVER engines require spool up time, no? Thats my logic anyhow. The engines in this game are like torchship engines, infinite acceleration/specific impulse. Very unscientific but otherwise fun cause you can actually go places in space without having to plot hohmann transfers.

A big problem I'm noticing is because of the Far culling for the camera in godot I had to make things very small (relative to the global scale) and theres lot of floating point weirdness when you zoom in. Give it a try and see if you can see what I mean. If you see something that you hate, tell me. If you see something you love and want to see more of, tell me!

Thanks all.
 
I guess you don't mean infinite acceleration, because if that were true you'd go from a standstill to lightspeed in an instant. Indeed if you've a specific impulse, IIRC you can determine the acceleration from that (divide by mass maybe, I forget).

This reminds me of a game released for the Acorn Risc PC towards the end of its sales lifetime, I think it was PD or freeware, and it has Star in the title I think, but I can't find it now. It's not really at all like your game though, IIRC since it just used a simple point and squirt control mechanism as I recall, and wasn't set in a realistic universe.
 
Looks... stellar ;)

You can always have stuff in there that is not scientific just because it is fun (or easier to program).
Making stuff so it's easy enough to use is already difficult.
 
I guess you don't mean infinite acceleration, because if that were true you'd go from a standstill to lightspeed in an instant. Indeed if you've a specific impulse, IIRC you can determine the acceleration from that (divide by mass maybe, I forget).

This reminds me of a game released for the Acorn Risc PC towards the end of its sales lifetime, I think it was PD or freeware, and it has Star in the title I think, but I can't find it now. It's not really at all like your game though, IIRC since it just used a simple point and squirt control mechanism as I recall, and wasn't set in a realistic universe.

Yeah, okay not infinite impulse, but extremely powerful and extremely efficient.

Starflight? That too is a major inspiration.
 
Last edited:
No, I wasn't thinking of Starflight, that seems to be a DOS game from 1986. This was at least a decade after that and ran on ARM processors. It was a lot more arcade like, and not really like Apogee at all - I was just reminded slightly by the appearance is all.
 
So now I'm working on the other half of the game which takes place planetside or on spacestations. Right now I'm working out how to control a player inside an O'Neill Cylinder. I have the gravity figured out but trying to get the player character to always stand with "up" being the right way is proving challenging. I may have to change the player object from a Kinematic to a RigidBody and take full advantage of the physics engine. Getting closer!
 
Got a little further with the radial gravity (more like radial repulsion)


This is the character moving around the surface, not the cylinder rotating. Because the repulsion comes from a single point moving lengthwise down the tube produces weird physics problems. Need to find a way to keep the point of repulsion directly "above" the player.
 
Back
Top