14 comments

  • edelbitter 5 hours ago
    Already used (sounds like, successfully) by the usual GitHub phishing campaigns:

    > found a workaround for the shader compilation bug that keeps the mesh from vanishing. I attached the fix here.

    https://github.com/carbonengine/trinity/issues/21

    (Microsoft should stop it with the "This is not the web page you are looking for." where people specifically came looking to learn whether something was administratively blocked - or whether it is no longer available by choice of the affected party.)

    • quantummagic 5 hours ago
      With all due respect, this reads to me as a couple of confusing non sequiturs. I took a quick look at the link you included, and it didn't help me understand what you're talking about either. Probably I'm just horrendously ignorant, but I would love to understand what you're referring to, and the point you're making about it.
      • jerf 5 hours ago
        The zip file referenced in https://github.com/carbonengine/trinity/issues/21#issuecomme... is probably malware, per https://github.com/carbonengine/trinity/issues/21#issuecomme... . I didn't sit there and decompile the thing but even just running "strings" on the .exe is more evidence in favor of that, it has things like domain names that a "driver" shouldn't have. Whether or not "procedural" is part of the scam or a legit victim, I have not much opinion.
      • edelbitter 4 hours ago
        Because we may be missing comments that GitHub has deleted without leaving tombstones (which sucks), it is not entirely clear whether the person creating and responding to the issue I linked is the person trying to have others run that trojan file, or whether they have fallen victim to it .. and merely quoted the link from a now-vanished comment.

        In any case, this is the file they referenced, which is still all over GitHub under various "fix.exe" file names in likely LLM-generated issues and issue comments: https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/d85d164e46fabb085609f258...

        • anigbrowl 2 hours ago
          It's your comment which is deficient. I happen to know what you're referring to, but this and your GP comment are written as reminders for people who already know what you're talking about, rather than being explanatory for people who don't.

          A better approach might have been It seems the usual suspects are still abusing Github pull requests to distribute malware [...]

      • ErroneousBosh 4 hours ago
        The "issue" raised says "hey I found a bug, no ships are rendered, run this .exe file to fix it!" and someone did just that.

        You don't run just random binaries off the Internet on your computers, do you?

        Nooooo, of course you don't.

        • mschuster91 4 hours ago
          > You don't run just random binaries off the Internet on your computers, do you?

          Humans might exercise some context-aware caution... AI agents, however?

      • AgentMasterRace 3 hours ago
        you're the perfect victim
        • quantummagic 3 hours ago
          I appreciate your admiration, but I assure you I put on my pants one leg at a time.
    • int0x29 44 minutes ago
      I opened a bug in an unrelated repo yesterday and nearly immediately got hit with one of those. Kinda wish I'd downloaded the zip before it got deleted. I'm curious what the attack was.

      I ignored it because it wasn't a pull request or patch file, it came too fast, and the explanation misidentified the source of the problem.

    • tangenter 5 hours ago
      Pains me to see it play out like this. Crazy simple, and effective.
  • mynegation 8 hours ago
    What engine? Is not this game played in a spreadsheet?
    • axus 5 hours ago
      https://prosperousuniverse.com is closer, but still not actually a spreadsheet.

      "This is EVE Online for people who think the 3D spaceships part of EVE is time wasted away from their spreadsheets. "

      • adamrezich 5 hours ago
        I got way into Prosperous Universe for a few months, a few years back—it was fun for awhile but the pace at which new features were being added to the game was (and still seems to be) absolutely glacial, given what the game is. Really fun ideas in there, though.
        • eminence32 1 hour ago
          There's been some new features in the past few years. But you're right that the general pace of new features is slow. There's only about 0.8 developers working on the game.

          However, if you're the type of person that likes to work on spreadsheets to calculate profit margins and market trends, Prosperous Universe is worth checking out.

          • adamrezich 52 minutes ago
            One thing I didn't like about it (and briefly experimented with, in a prototype for my own game in a similar vein), was, much like EVE, it's called a “spreadsheet game”, but there's no spreadsheets in the game, or any sort of API bridge that makes doing stuff with the game in an external spreadsheet environment easier. I understand that this may just be part of the appeal of these sorts of games for many people—reading through stat blocks and wiki pages to figure out what numbers and what formulas need to go where to build the Ultimate Spreadsheet for your purposes (though in the end doesn't everyone just use existing Ultimate Spreadsheets created by others, or at least use them as reference?). And trust me, I did have a lot of fun building my Google Sheets infrastructure to coordinate business and production between myself and the three friends I got to (briefly) play Prosperous Universe with me. Also, don't get me wrong, I also enjoyed the subsequent rabbit-hole of learning how spreadsheet implementations actually work, including historical alternative spreadsheet implementations that had a lot of cool ideas like Lotus Improv [0]. But, in the end, I just wasn't having enough fun with Prosperous Universe to keep playing after awhile.

            [0] This video is worth watching the opening few minutes of just for the vibes alone (trust me) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgGmKD87U3M

            • progval 45 minutes ago
              There is a third-party API now: https://doc.fnar.net/ , which collects data through a browser extension that scraps the traffic. This kind of extension is blessed by the devs as long as it does not automate actions.
    • pugworthy 4 hours ago
      MMOSS (Massive Multiplayer Online Screen Saver) is what I've always seen it as. Beautiful game. Not for the faint of heart .
    • sim04ful 7 hours ago
      Jokes aside apparently they've hired economist to keep the game's market's stable.
      • Cthulhu_ 7 hours ago
        This was at least a decade ago, but the game's economy seems to be managed well enough. Cost of having stuff transported is still 1M / jump.
        • reactordev 5 hours ago
          PLEX keeps the markets stable now as they control the flow of PLEX like its Spice from Arrakis
        • sitzkrieg 1 hour ago
          depends on size, location, contents, risk, a million other factors. people are not paying 1m/jump to get stuffed freightered around by jita lol
      • tuzemec 7 hours ago
    • Cthulhu_ 7 hours ago
      Yes, but you can turn a visual representation on by pressing ctrl+shift+f9.
    • jeremyjh 2 hours ago
      I thought it was played on the forums? That’s where the nullsec alliance game was played in my day.
    • jpfromlondon 4 hours ago
      it used to be, but it's been less and less perverse over the past ten to fifteen years.
  • cassianoleal 8 hours ago
    I've wanted to try out EVE Online for a while now. Never found the time, and it seems to be a bit of a time sink. Since I have no idea if I'm actually going to enjoy it or not, it never took priority.

    These kinds of news make me want to find the time. Good job!

    • colkassad 6 hours ago
      I bought the game when it first came out (2003? Boxed, from Target) and played with an online friend for a while. We mostly mined and we didn't really have a corporation, it was just the two of us. There wasn't much else to do at the time. At one point I fell asleep at my keyboard during a mining op. Gave up soon after.

      In 2015 a coworker talked me into trying it again. We joined a small corporation, swore fealty to a larger corp (Brave? Band of Brothers?) and moved to low-security space. We got involved in massive 3000+ ship battles, some of which made the news. These are not as fun as you would think.

      However, the most fun I had was joining 100+ ship bomber fleets that would warp in on unsuspecting mining operations and destroying billions of ISK (in game currency) worth of ships. We'd use Mumble for voice chat, which allows for a hierarchy of chat rooms, so that we could hear the fleet commander giving orders but he couldn't hear us. It was super organized and our fleet commander was really skilled.

      In the end I couldn't keep up with the time commitments. For the fun stuff, you had to be online at a certain time and there was a lot of prep involved (buying the proper ships which changed all the time, getting your ships to the right station, etc). I still consider it some of the best multiplayer experiences I've ever had though. Nothing beats warping in and seeing those huge mining ships and then hearing the fleet commander start issuing targeting orders. It would raise the hair on my arms.

      • Twirrim 3 hours ago
        > I still consider it some of the best multiplayer experiences I've ever had though.

        I played Eve for a few years as part of a corporation in Xetic and then Ascendant Frontier.

        So many painful large battles (time dilation got added after I stopped playing), and some wild solo fights. My favourite was the time I got caught solo in a T2 Interceptor, when out scouting. We knew an attack was coming but didn't know where.

        I screwed up, and found myself surrounded by 5 enemy player ships, with no possibility of escaping. The only thing going for me was that I was in an inty, and they were in larger ships, so I could outmanouver them. I knew I was done for. If I flew away they'd be able to hit me as the only thing keeping me safe was my radial velocity (I was orbiting the ship faster than their weapons can rotate, but that only really works 1 on 1, to the other ships you're not moving quite as fast)

        It was really just about how long I could hold out and making sure I was ready to warp the moment I got podded. I constantly switched orbit between ships, trying to keep them close together so I could maintain high radial velocity, while taking pot shots at them and starting to chip away at armour, and taking glancing shots from them myself. It felt like that fight went on for hours, but it was probably only 5 or so minutes before they finally managed to pod me, and I managed to warp away to freedom. That was probably nearly 20 years ago (I stopped playing maybe late 2007 / early 2008?) and I still remember it vividly. Once I'd got myself to safety I remember just sitting in my seat staring at the screen, as the adrenaline faded.

      • vsviridov 5 hours ago
        My buddy and I were playing a bunch of years back, unaffiliated with a big corp, just doing our own thing in mid-sec systems. They added wormhole diving into w-space in one of the updates, and we decided to try it out, which was pretty fun. We both made enough resource to fly Drakes at the time.

        In one of the wormhole there was an ambush, I got blown up but my buddy managed to lose them, but didn't leave the system. He started talking to them in local chat, and in the end we ended up joining them. We were playing together for a while after, but life ultimately took over for me. My buddy remained for a while. He was a long-haul trucker and would play in his downtime from various truck stops across US and Canada.

        • colkassad 5 hours ago
          My coworker ended up defecting to a corporation that lived in wormhole space! The wormholes add so much to the game. A lot of times we'd find the mining ops by people scouting through wormholes. Another activity I liked was hacking those resource thingies (I forget what they were called, or even what they were). Doing that in wormhole space was so scary but the payoffs could be huge.
      • WorldMaker 1 hour ago
        I watched a couple battles at the most time dilation over the shoulders of college friends. They would have entire days of needing having EVE open on their laptop through every class and that gave me enough of an understanding to realize I probably wouldn't enjoy that.

        I got a lot out of Empires of Eve which tells a lot of the big stories of Eve in a very approachable multiple volumes of history books: https://www.empiresofeve.com/

        The author put so much amazing work into those, including interviewing people that were there for many of those battles and compiling great visualizations to help make the battles easier to read.

      • Pyrodogg 5 hours ago
        NPSI romps were pretty fun. Been a few years since I've fired it up.

        NPSI = Not Purple, Shoot It!

        Squad up and then move to some objective location and raise hell shooting anything (w/ coordination from squad leader since the idea is to usually pool DPSl) not in the squad.

        • cbm-vic-20 3 hours ago
          For the non-EVE players, when you join a fleet in-game, the other members of the fleet have a purple icon next to their name. NPSI is a play-style where you join transient fleets with the express intention of getting into battles.

          Players in your own corporation and alliance typically have blue icons, and those you're at war with have red icons- this is based on manually-set "standings". Alliance roams typically have a NBSI policy: Not Blue, Shoot It!, which means you'll be attacking enemies and neutrals.

      • wavemode 4 hours ago
        What is it about the giant battles that was not fun?
        • cbm-vic-20 3 hours ago
          To expand on "time dilation": an EVE Online star system is served by a single compute node in their server farm at a time. Most systems are empty most of the the time, but some locations in the universe have much more player activity. Eve can dynamically move systems between server nodes, depending on player activity. Once the number grows into the thousands in a single system, the server CPU resources can't keep up. In the past (prior to 2011), this would make the game randomly unresponsive, or cause dropped connections.

          Time Dilation is the in-game solution for this: the simulation is throttled so the game runs slower for everybody, but doesn't kick people off. Last time I checked, time dilation could go as low as 10% normal time- meaning you can only fire at 10% normal rate, move 10% as fast, etc. It feels like your ship is flying through molasses- it's not fun, but is also more fair for all players.

          Alliances that know there will be a big fight can fill out a form with Eve Online to "schedule" the fight so that star system can be migrated to a larger server before the fight.

        • dxdm 4 hours ago
          I was never part of one, but in case nobody with more experience chimes in: I'm assuming the large battles involve a lot of sitting around, pressing the occasional button to change to the next designated target, while stuck in massive game-time dilation:

          https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Time_dilation

        • syncsynchalt 2 hours ago
          Games are not as fun at 1 fps, or with 10s input lag.
        • singron 3 hours ago
          The system the fight is in experiences time-dilation, where everything slows down to 10% speed or even less. However, a few effects create a positive feedback loop that makes the problem worse.

          All the surrounding systems still run at full speed. You can travel large distances and still arrive soon enough to matter in the fight. You can also die, respawn in another system, rejoin the fight, and barely miss anything. The positions in the fight therefore move even slower than time-dilation since ships on both sides are replaced so quickly.

          Large groups have a massive advantage over small groups, so alliances are very large and join various alliances-of-alliances. The playerbase is often organized into only 2-3 major coalitions. At some points in history, nearly all the alliances have joined the same coalition, which leads to a strange pax-Romana called the "blue donut" (referring to all the ownable outer-systems being "blue" or allied with each other).

          Also, nearly every player in a large fight just follows simple orders. Orbit A and shoot B. There are just a few people calling the shots.

          Fights sometimes end just because people are bored, need to sleep, or go to work.

        • jpfromlondon 4 hours ago
          time dilation
      • zer00eyz 2 hours ago
        > However, the most fun I had was joining 100+ ship bomber fleets

        Bombers Bar!

        In a twist of fate, my corp found one of their fleets sitting in wh space waiting on their scouts...

        We did the only appropriate thing and bombed them.

        I think I giggled for about 3 hours after that, and recalling the story brought a smile to my face.

    • mhitza 5 hours ago
      It's a time sink, where much of the gameplay happens outside the game, or with tools outside the game, and at mid-high level it seems that social engineering your "friends" is the only true 7d-chess tactic.

      I'd really like to see a new game in this genre that does things better and leaves room for more ways of play.

      I've followed along this game more than the ~6 month I've played it (and EVE Echoes for a year) and all I can say is that playing as an explorer can be fun. Though so much time wasted scanning solar systems. I would be logging; on travel through wormholes that connect different solar systems, mapped out within a third-party site for the corporation I was part of, particularly to mark shortcuts to the major trade hubs. And in all this time I found only two Ghost Sites[0] (my favorite PvE mission type for exploration), which are hard trials for an explorer that test your situational awareness, maneuvering, puzzle solving skills, and strategy to make the most out of them. If I would have come across more often, I would probably be hooked on the game for longer.

      [0] https://www.eveonline.com/eve-academy/careers/explorer/ghost...

    • weberer 7 hours ago
      It is definitely a social game. You're not going to have a good time if you try to play it solo. At least that was the case when I played it 10+ years ago. No clue if they changed it significantly since then.
      • Cthulhu_ 7 hours ago
        It hasn't, at best since then they've added more ship personalization options in the form of ship skins, and some gamification via events, daily login campaigns, and now seasonal-like content where they promote different activities. The current one started yesterday, you can track down and / or follow NPC haulers (or something like that; the event does not appear in sov null. I moved there a month ago after it seemed like that's where all the fun stuff happens)
    • Dzugaru 8 hours ago
      Depends on the way you play can be a time sink, or session-like game. It is extremely deep and complex to learn from scratch though.

      I've made some of the best friends playing it when I had time, friendship formed out of high stakes in this game (you regularly lose hours of grind or real money if you pay for the game - in seconds) and respect you have for each other skill.

    • trashb 5 hours ago
      The new player experience is quite nice now a days. The PvE campaigns has also been improved over the last few years.

      To go deep into it I feel like social gameplay is required but there are plenty of opportunities to consume Eve Online in short bursts. Even when connected with a Corp or other player organizations like Red vs Blue. I found there is also a lot of mechanics that can be enjoyed solo or with light socialization.

      To anyone considering it: I would encourage you to jump in with a free account and try it out! and fly safe!

  • j-bos 8 hours ago
  • torginus 1 hour ago
    I have a cheeky idea - imagine you're a company (especially a games company, whose engine is a small part of the whole product). You want to cut dev costs by AI - problem is your 100k codebase is completely unknown to most LLMs. So you release all your code, and labs will gobble it up and train on it for free.

    So come a year maybe, suddenly ChatGPT or Claude will know the code like the back of its hand.

    • y1n0 1 hour ago
      Corollary: get other people to spend their tokens on PRs
  • taybin 9 hours ago
    For a long time I was convinced they used Erlang for handling all the distributed, concurrent state. I guess not.
    • hinkley 10 minutes ago
      No but I used to read their dev blog and if there was a n app that needed Erlang it was Eve. They would announce the latest strategy they had for big battles and it was always reinventing part of Erlang.
    • ManBeardPc 9 hours ago
      Last I checked (and remember right) they used Stackless Python. Very interesting, it can serialize tasklets and send them to another machine to continue executing. Seems no longer maintained though.
      • zipy124 8 hours ago
        They moved away. Details in this blog post: https://evefrontier.com/en/news/moving-into-the-future-upgra...
        • JCharante 5 hours ago
          I mean eve frontier is a pretty huge fork from almost scratch, did they backport changes into normal eve?
        • NooneAtAll3 8 hours ago
          > Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information).

          ...why did they make a website not html-first?

          • Groxx 2 hours ago
            Game websites are second only to restaurants in average UI complexity. Lots of them do extremely complicated stuff to provide game-realistic framerates to visitors so they can see if it meets their expectations (10fps or so).
          • bcye 5 hours ago
            I figure this is the nextjs exception? The website would probably be HTML-first (I.e. SSR, would work non-interactively without JS), just that the JS doesn’t fail silently.
      • tjpnz 8 hours ago
        Is this unique to Stackless Python?
        • ManBeardPc 7 hours ago
          Don‘t know any other runtimes that have that by default. Probably kind of possible in Erlang or so by transferring the state, but stopping and moving a green thread in the middle of execution I’ve not seen elsewhere.
          • swiftcoder 1 hour ago
            It used to be popular to do this in Scala (with Akka). You serialise a LocalTaskRef and send it across the network, resume it on another host
          • toast0 4 hours ago
            In Erlang, you can definitely send a fun and arguments to be run on a different node. And a lot of processes are built around passing in State as an argument and rerurning the NewState in the return... So you might not need a lot of work to adapt to moving processes around. Not really moving processes though; starting a new process with the old state and killing the old one.

            You would need to be careful with the process dictionary (either don't use it, or copy it over), and you'd need a way to disseminate the new process identity and to forward messages arriving at the old process. Dealing with links and monitors would be doable. The process couldn't have Port references, so no sockets or open files or driver references; those aren't network transparent and I assume you'd be doing process migration as part of node migration so those ports would have to be closed soon anyway.

            I'm having trouble coming up with a usecase that this would enable. But... at WhatsApp we did do something conceptually similar I guess when a client connected on a new connection before the old connection was detected closed. The new client2server process would message the old process and the state would be transferred ... but you would probably do that in any language.

            Anyway, sounds fun!

          • switchbak 3 hours ago
            Java's RMI sounds similar ... but I haven't really seen much of that used in a robust way. You can only ship serializable state which becomes quite limiting after a while. Shipping the data and reusing the same code across nodes seems to accomplish the same thing with less headaches.
    • strobe 9 hours ago
      at least while ago they used Stackless Python
  • MrDresden 1 hour ago
    I used to have a character named Fenris in EVE. Probably shouldn't have recycled them all those years ago.
  • msukkarieh 3 hours ago
    interestingly they support multiple graphics APIs (Dx11, Dx12, and Metal) through an abstraction layer: https://app.sourcebot.dev/chat/cmrcbnd6u00cvwa5bup88jf0j
  • sushidev 7 hours ago
    Can I use this to release my own games, and does this release includes everything needed to build games like EVE online?
    • ____mr____ 7 hours ago
      All of it is under MIT so probably.

      Not sure about if it includes everything to make EVE online though

      • nottorp 6 hours ago
        Does it include the server or just the base for the client?

        Edit: someone posted below that it's base disparate components, not the actual game. So you can (MIT) but you'll have to put some work in.

  • jdw64 8 hours ago
    I followed and forked it on GitHub. When Eve Online first came out, the graphics were stunning. I'm planning to dig into the code and take a close look at how the graphics renderer was implemented.
  • lyu07282 8 hours ago
    Seems like a huge chunk is missing there, these mostly seem to me like a bunch of smaller reusable components with nothing really tying it together.
    • adrian17 8 hours ago
      Makes sense, they probably don’t want to leak _the_ secret sauce driving the game itself.

      I saw some eve-specific logic in Destiny repo, like warp enter condition and warp velocity math, or entity visibility between grids.

      (Also, it’s full of std::(unordered_)map/set. Surprised they didn’t try squeeze some more perf there.)

      • 0xffff2 1 hour ago
        If there was ever a game where the secret sauce doesn't have anything at all to do with the code, Eve has got to be it. They could probably release every single thing including all of the assets, complete buildable client and server code, etc and I doubt it would hurt the Eve at all.
      • lyu07282 4 hours ago
        But they announced it as if they are releasing a game engine? This is just bits and pieces of one with major missing pieces so I'm not sure what the point was with that. I guess its more to help modding or they are yet to release everything they wanted.
  • Cthulhu_ 7 hours ago
    I hope this will lead to some AI bros quickly finding performance optimization options; the game can be very heavy on graphics despite most of what's visible being a skybox and UI elements, and the UI is often very sluggish and unresponsive, that is, they seem to be doing too much on the main thread.
    • nottorp 6 hours ago
      What's the point, you just press Ctrl Shift F9 to play the real Eve.
      • pentium166 6 hours ago
        Because that display mode is often also sluggish in the scenarios where you would reach for it, including client-side input handling, and it loses information like the radius of interdiction bubbles.
  • hparadiz 7 hours ago
    Not a fan of space engines where locations are fixed.
    • cultofmetatron 7 hours ago
      what you want a game where they take into account the expansion of space? are we also going to model the complete breakdown of causality on the otherside of the ftl?
      • hparadiz 7 hours ago
        They don't even do orbits of basic solar system objects. Lol.

        Eve online has always just pretended to be a space sim.

        • dantillberg 6 hours ago
          It helps me to just think of all these games as early 20th century naval warfare sims with a fantasy space theme. We like dreadnoughts and have a hard time with extraterrestrial physics.
          • trashb 5 hours ago
            To me it seems like the engine (and the mechanics) are focused on being an MMO first and a "simulation" second. From their website "EVE Online is a community-driven spaceship MMORPG where players can play free, choosing their own path from countless options."

            There are concepts in the game that would be unlikely in a simulation game but are common in MMO's. Think of fast travel, instance dungeons and more.

            One of Eve Online's strengths is that it conforms gameplay to the MMO setting. That is one of the main driving factors in it's design and allows for example for Time dilation, huge battles and continuous universe and economy that it is famous for.

            This is different from for example World of Warcraft, in my view that is a RPG first MMO second. That is one of the reasons it has sharding and smaller pvp battles.

            • dantillberg 4 hours ago
              Indeed, I would even say that EVE chose to be unsharded/monolithic first, and many of the key design choices flow from that, including the fantasy space setting itself.

              The monolithic world needs to be big to spread everyone out. And it's easier to create ten thousand "systems" than it would be to create an immersive terrestrial world with a similar scale. Each EVE system is just a bunch of objects floating in a 3D space that you travel between.

              • hparadiz 4 hours ago
                Positioning of things in orbit around a point in space is cheap. The issue was probably how much more complicated it would be to make all the missions if things kept moving around. You could end up with things on opposite sides of a solar system that are currently right next to each other. But to me it takes me out of the game when I see stuff like that in the engine.
          • m4rtink 5 hours ago
            Well, even in Naval battles the environment is not this static - weather playing a major role in many naval campaigns, from hiding your ship in a rain squall to braving freezing waters during the polar night with the arctic convoys.

            And of course tide played a major role, with the Germans during the Battle of Jutland racing to get past a sand bang to avoid being stuck at open sea & be mauled even more by the British.

          • xboxnolifes 2 hours ago
            Even more accurately, these generation of games are chat rooms with set dressing.
        • snapcaster 7 hours ago
          games are about fun, if something only adds realism for no reason it's not good game design to add it
          • m4rtink 5 hours ago
            I still think it would be doable if done right. There are so many interesting elements of modern science and hard SF that could be included to introduce interesting game mechanics:

            - adding various types of radiators (solid, droplet, etc.), gloving when weapons fire or engines activate, shooting them off prevents system from running

            - planets on eccentric orbits with wildly varying surface conditions in mere days as the planet periodically get closer and farther to the star, from frozen solid to metals flowing like water days apart

            - aerostat habitats in the atmosphere on gas giants or Venus like worlds, you could fly around but go to low (or get swept by a storm) and you might get crushed

            - radiation belts, sun grazing comets or energy harvesting stations very close to a stellar body, can enter for a very limited time until even your shielded systems burn out - and good like with repair space walks!

            - tidally locked bodies, where one side is always illuminated and the other one has an eternal night, with perhaps a thin habitable belt where conditions are just right for life, presenting interesting options for story telling and world building

            • drakythe 3 hours ago
              Doing all of that math and tracking them is a huge order. Outer Wilds famously simulates an entire solar system using Unity and they had an issue early in development where bugs would occur more frequently as the player visited the edge of the solar system due to floating point math getting wonky in the engine and the solar system's Sun being 0,0,0 coordinates. Their solution? Make the player coordinate 0,0,0 and everything else moves _around_ the player. That's right, in Outer Wilds, when you jump, the planet you're on is actually moving away from you. But they managed to use this method to simulate newtonian physics pretty well.

              And even that solution is only temporary. Its possible to watch the simulation go on so long that planets begin to de-orbit the sun as the math simulation breaks down. For spoiler reasons players don't run into this issue, but it exists.

              PS: If you haven't played Outer Wilds and you enjoy exploration/puzzle games go play it. Avoid spoilers if possible.

            • torginus 1 hour ago
              From playing quite a bit of KSP, I'd say an issue is that realistic space travel consists of a lot of waiting to get to the right part of the orbit. You have time dilation for that in SP, but not in MP.
              • hparadiz 1 hour ago
                This thread is going off the rails with taking the realism aspect of what I said too literally. I'm not saying remove FTL from the game. I'm saying having the map change ....very slowly. It would make things more interesting.
          • dmos62 6 hours ago
            Fun is of course subjective. Some of us care about realism more than others.
            • dxdm 3 hours ago
              I think we're all aware of that. The post you're responding to essentially made the same point you did, but to someone who thought it appropriate to express their love for realism in a much less mature way.
            • nkrisc 2 hours ago
              I bet some do, but not enough for anyone to ever make a commercial game that focuses on hyper-realistic, multiplayer space travel.
            • tekla 6 hours ago
              It's going to be such a fun game flying 1000 lightyears at a couple hundred meters per second.
        • forgetfreeman 7 hours ago
          That's inaccurate, orbital periods are a thing at least for moons. It's one of those things you'd have to spend a year or two piloting an Orca to notice though.
          • hparadiz 7 hours ago
            Are stations and jump gates still fixed in place?
            • stackskipton 6 hours ago
              Yes and almost no one cares.
              • fl4regun 4 hours ago
                if anything, people DON'T want them to move because it will ruin their bookmarks over time. It is not going to be fun to have to manually update your bookmarks just because a space station got slightly pulled into some nearby planet or whatever.
            • snapcaster 5 hours ago
              how would it impact the fun of the game if they weren't?
              • fl4regun 4 hours ago
                I mentioned this in another comment, but if they moved you would have to manually update bookmarks to warp to those locations as they drifted, annoying.
              • tekla 2 hours ago
                Because fairly few players want to update space coordinates of hundreds of objects as a daily chore
                • hparadiz 1 hour ago
                  You would not need to update any bookmarks. They should be using a coordinate system based on a relative object. Existing bookmarks are already technically relative the largest gravity well. New bookmarks would simply be based on whatever you want like any object. Absolutely no reason to overcomplicate it. Dunno why you're assuming you'd need to update anything.
                  • snapcaster 1 hour ago
                    at no point are you justifying why this would be FUN. it's like you don't even understand what a game is supposed to be
                    • hparadiz 1 hour ago
                      Tactics like being able to have your fleet hiding behind a moon that happens to orbit into the exact right position at the right time is fun to me. Eve Online is already a spreadsheet simulator so I find it about as fun as watching paint dry. Anyway I don't think basic physics is about fun or not fun.
                      • tekla 1 hour ago
                        Claiming to appreciate tactics involving realistic orbital maneuvering but also hating spreadsheet simulators is an incredibly strange position.

                        How does one want a realistic space game but also hate spreadsheets?

                        • hparadiz 1 hour ago
                          I didn't say I hate them. I said I don't find them fun.

                          Anyway I don't need a spreadsheet to know where a moon is gonna be in N time. A simple visual simulation I can whip up with AI in minutes would do the trick.

                  • tekla 1 hour ago
                    So you've never played the game.

                    Ok, lets try one example, the game has a mechanic where a station has a docking port where all ships exit oriented in a single direction. Many pilots have bookmarks that allow them warp very quickly away because turning around is slow so the bookmark is oriented straight directly away from the exit. How does one deal with that in a solar system if we assume even minimal orbital simulations?. It has 9 planets 33 moons, and only the dumb players warp directly to any particular planet or moon because of course everyone expects that, so they place them in random positions in space.

                    Are you able to do n-body math in your head?

                    • hparadiz 1 hour ago
                      I played it for years. Shaking my head at this silliness. You just set the bookmark to a 50 meters off the side of whatever station and then the position of the station is basic orbital algebra that takes almost no CPU to calculate. It's dumb you can't just activate the warp to immediately activate for one second in whatever direction. Another reason I stopped playing. Irl you'd warp away in any direction if you're about to get blasted. You wouldn't be wasting time aligning to some random bookmark. This is why I can't take Eve online seriously. Like you actually think that a 25 year old engine is the best design ever for some reason.
        • codezero 5 hours ago
          How fast can you speed run KSP RP/RO?
        • tekla 6 hours ago
          > pretended to be a space sim.

          When has it ever done that.

          Keep in mind, I played like starting year 3

    • Andrex 6 hours ago
      Which ones are not?
      • bigmadshoe 5 hours ago
        Kerbal Space Program at a minimum
        • tekla 2 hours ago
          I was not aware KSP supported thousands of players on a single grid shooting each other and the calculations associated with it.