ScrumbleShip is the most accurate space combat simulation devised to date. Gather resources, construct a capital ship out of individual blocks, then pilot it with AI or human help against other players.
Massive Asteroid
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The asteroid generator now turns out the most common shape of asteroid - Potato-shaped. Seriously. Most asteroids are this shape. Crazy, yeah?
This behemoth is around 170 blocks in diameter and contains well over a half million individual blocks. It took around 2 seconds to generate, although that doesn't account for cave or crater generation. (Which aren't in place yet). Neither should take more than a second on an asteroid this size. Yesterday an asteroid half this size took 30-60 seconds to generate.
The new high-speed generation opens the door to REALLY big asteroids - At a guesstimate, a 1.5km long asteroid would take around 1-2 minutes to generate, (Including caves, craters, and features) once I get a couple small bugs solved.
While the size of even this asteroid seems outlandish (And is it), I believe I ought to be able to simulate spaceships of its side easily on most modern computers. My heat test code, for example, ran 6x faster than realtime while unoptimized on a 100x100x100 grid - Which is around twice as many blocks as are in this picture.
I've just realized that if I update the heat-testing code, I could melt this asteroid. I... need to go code more now.
Cheers,
-Dirk
Wow, that is a huge one. I would be really surprised if any but the biggest capital ships reach that size.. and if you had it running 6x the runtime speed in Richard, then we could see some seriously massive battles in this one!
BTW, how will temperature and lasers work?
First, energy is generated in your ship. This creates a small amount of heat for you to expel. The energy is routed down your network(s) of superconducting wires to your laser.
A weapons terminal is placed somewhere in the ship, and connected to your wire network(s). You use the terminal, select which weapon it is used to fire, how the laser fires (Continuous or pulse) and how much power the weapon will drain - 100% power takes 100% energy; 50% power takes 25% energy. 150% power takes 200% energy. You will be able to scale up beyond 100% more or less endlessly, limited only by how much power your capital ship can generate, although it will get progressively more expensive.
When you give the "all hands to battle stations" order from your captain's terminal, redshirted clones sprint to man this weapon station. They take aim at the enemy ship you have indicated with your captain's terminal as best as they are able given their current mental state. If they do a poor job you can walk over and take control of the terminal yourself and show them how it's done.
Once the laser beam arrives at the enemy ship, we need to figure out how much damage it will do. Each material can reflect different amounts of laser light - Damage and component type will affect this reflectivity. The less reflective a material is, the more of the energy from the laser it receives, and the more it heats up.
Heat is transferred throughout the ship according to physical laws. If you laser is very high powered and/or pulsed, you are likely to puncture the hull, venting atmosphere but doing little other damage. If your laser is low powered and/or continuous, you are more likely to warm the hull in general, slowly melting components, clones, and player characters.
Heat physics should be more or less real-life-accurate down to ~1 degree kelvin, 1 second of time, and 1 meter of space.
Cheers!
-Dirk