Released Demo 0.002
Torchships ‘Candle’ is an experiment in simulating exploring and fighting in space. It will begin with individual movement inside a small starting space station, progress from there to EVA, and then on to larger and more capable spacecraft.
This demo is a first test of newtonian movement in zero g inside a small station and inflatable hab.
Torchships ‘Candle’ is an experiment in simulating exploring and fighting in space. It will begin with individual movement inside a small starting space station, progress from there to EVA, and then on to larger and more capable spacecraft.
This demo is a first test of newtonian movement in zero g inside a small station and inflatable hab.
Latest info at https://torchships.com/
If you see issues or bugs please leave them at the issue tracker at https://torchships.com/
Current demo version 0.001
Controls
* Mouse for pitch and yaw.
* WASD for thrust forward/backward – left/right
* Q & E for roll
* R & F for thrust up and down
* Tab key to show fps and memory values
* Esc key to pause/resume
Caveats
* No audio.
* No interaction with objects or the station.
* Can’t leave the inside of your starting station for now.
* Velocities and thrust levels are not final values, will adjust to be more realistic.
* No consumables.
* Angular movement is damped over time as you move.
Next Priorities
* User defined keyboard and controls mapping
* HOTAS support
* first person body with ik and hands
* VR test
Please check out Children of a Dead Earth and support them if you can, this is a very scientifically accurate space combat simulation. I have enjoyed it so far. Their blog explores the science behind the game. It is available on Steam and you can see a trailer here. Another recent space flight game I’ve enjoyed in VR is Lunar Flight – it has a great physics model as well.
I’ve suspended the early access sign up page for now. I haven’t been able to dedicate as much time as I wanted to TorchShips and progress is slow. I don’t want anyone else signing up for Early Access until I have a clearer idea of what my progress is going to be over the next 3-4 months. I do have some small ‘toy’ demos where I’ve been working out game mechanics that are fairly complete – I’ll try to post those in the next few weeks.
If you’ve already signed up for Early Access you are still good for the rewards – but if you’d like to pull out of the program due to the delay don’t hesitate to contact me and I’ll refund your money.
The reason I’ve been so slow on TorchShips the last six months is that I’m doing a large amount of development for the VR startup MergeVR. We are doing some very cool stuff over at MergeVR – the goal is bring mobile VR that works with any face and any phone to the general public via retail stores and online. Take a look if you have a chance….
There’s been a lot of controversy in the last few days generated by the announcement from Elite:Dangerous that they are dropping offline solo play.
I am a fan and early backer of the game, and I like what they are building so far, but I do want to make it clear that TorchShips will have a solo offline mode at launch. I won’t release a game that is completely unplayable if we go out of business in the future or a server provider goes offline.
Unbelievable pictures on Flickr from Rosetta mission to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
I’ve uploaded a new video. The initial scenario in the demo will take place around a Neptune class planet (about 20 times the mass of Earth – approximate radius of 25,000 km) with an extensive ring system. The system star is now much closer to what it should look like – white (our sun is yellow to our eyes because of the atmosphere – it looks white in space) and with a smaller apparent size than we see from earth.
I’ve updated the HUD to give me more screen real estate – the indicators on the top left and right are live. Your suit HUD will show you remaining deltaV, maneuvering propellant (attitude thrusters), life support, and power remaining.
Most of my work over the last few weeks has been dealing with scale issues in Unity3d. Several other developers have written about this (Dave Newson, Sean O’Neil, etc). The basic problem is that Unity3d uses floating point variables for object placement and physics and that doesn’t give me enough accuracy to model a scene that could be 500,000 kilometers across or more, with scales that need to handle a person in a suit (2 meters) to a very large spaceship (500 meters) or asteroid (5 km) simultaneously.
What I’ve done is write my own basic extension to the Unity3d transform and rigidbody module that uses double precision variables. I’ve also incorporated some of Sean O’Neil’s ideas for handling the display of large distant objects (like planets) that are past the Unity3d camera far clipping plane (I’ll probably post a more detailed explanation of this with code on my product7 blog in the next few days). Units in Unity are arbitrary, in the demo I’m using one unit = 1 kilometer – so in render space the the demo the player camera starts about 40,000 kilometers from the planet within the first ring system. The demo and video have not been reconciled with realistic physics yet, the movement from thrusters is definitely overpowered at this point for example.
I do plan to release a very simple demo to the early access backers by the end of this month. The first public demo should follow a few weeks later. This demo will consist of a small part of the first chapter of TorchShips – beginning in your damaged suit with low remaining consumables, then your search for resources and a ship to captain…
Nice asteroid from Unity3d Asset Store. Great discussion on the forum about what space should look like – good points all – so I’ve dropped the ‘fancy’ stuff – no nebula, whirling galaxies, or pink gas clouds. Visual style is hard shadows, reflective surfaces in sunlight ‘wash-out’ the stars.
As you can tell from the earlier videos movement in your suit was pretty ponderous. I was basing this on other spacesuit simulators and what I’ve seen on videos of actual spacewalks.
After a lot of internal testing, frustration, and additional research I’ve changed the control scheme. Attitude change is much faster, you still have inertia and mass but you can change orientation in pitch, roll, and yaw relatively quickly. These changes are done with a single-gimbal control moment gyroscope mounted in your MMU. The gyroscope approach can produce a lot of torque for small power amounts and doesn’t waste precious reaction mass.
I’ve posted a video of the new control scheme – mouse for orientation (left/right yaw, up/down pitch, left/right with right mouse down for roll) and wasd keys for thrust forward/port/starboard/aft.
I believe this is approach more accurately reflects the future maneuverability of spacesuits and combat spacecraft. Ships will be able to change facing and orientation very quickly to unmask weapons or to use armored or less vulnerable sections of the ship to absorb incoming damage. Of course changing orientation does not affect your velocity vector – changing that will always take time and reaction mass.
I’m a week or two from releasing the first technical demo to early access members, with the first public demo to go out in late November. These demos will not have a lot of ‘game’ in them – they will mainly serve to introduce the initial control scheme and look and feel of TorchShips.
(Note on the images and video, still a lot of placeholder art, including the hud frame which was created by Entereri)
PBS short film on the Physics of Space Battles – some good points…
