Starship Simulator is a true work of passion, born of many a childhood dream to experience what it would truly be like to live and work on a massive deep space exploration vessel, just like the ones you see depicted in classic science fiction. A dream of walking among the stars, exploring distant worlds, and answering one of mankind's oldest questions... what awaits us in the great unknown?
You will serve as a crewmember on the maiden voyage of mankind's first-ever deep space exploration vessel - the Magellan Class. The ship has been designed and built from the ground up with an unprecedented level of detail. From the bare structural framework to the miles of cables and conduits, every part of the ship is fully simulated and designed to be scientifically plausible. Nothing is mere surface detail. Every button does something, and every piece of hardware serves a real purpose.
Real Structural Framework
The bare titanium that defines the physical structure of the ship has been designed in line with the latest manufacturing techniques used in the real world today, projected forward 200 years with advances in 3D Printing and AI-driven automation in mind. Unlike typical games where nothing exists behind walls and under floors, our ship exists as a completely solid and physical vessel.
Cables, Pipes & Hardware
Every system on the ship has simulated hardware driving it, and these systems are connected together by a complex network of pipes, cables, and conduits that exist in real-time. As an Engineer, you can follow every cable from source to destination while it passes through various pieces of hardware along the way.
Fully Explorable
With over 200 rooms spread over 7 decks, you are free to explore the entire ship on foot without barriers or loading screens. Gaze out of the panoramic lounge windows while the action outside of the ship is taking place in real-time, or hop in a shuttle and take it out for a quick spin. Our goal is to create a truly immersive sci-fi experience.
Our focus on science and realistic simulation also extends to the galaxy itself, with currently over 2 billion procedurally generated star systems to explore.
Procedural Generation
Our procedural algorithms are based on real-world astrophysics in order to generate not only believable but also scientifically plausible star systems. If you want to find Earth-like worlds, then you will need to seek out a star's habitable zone where liquid water can exist. This is based on not only the distance from the star but also the planet's albedo and atmospheric makeup.
Life Among the Stars
When you find a planet that's capable of supporting life, your scans will reveal the nature of that life and how advanced it is. It could be anything from simple bacteria to ancient alien civilizations that are millions of years more advanced than you. How will they react to your presence, and do you attempt to contact them?
Breathtaking Beauty
A NASA astronaut once said that without exception, every person to have ever looked down upon the Earth from aboard the ISS has shed a tear over its sheer beauty. We find that incredibly inspiring, and we're leveraging all the latest technologies and pushing Unreal Engine to its limits in order to achieve the most stunning visual experience possible. Entering orbit around a distant exoplanet should take your breath away.
Players can choose to occupy one of a number of different roles on the ship, with each one presenting the player with unique and interesting gameplay challenges.
Captain
Born to be in command, as the Captain, you will be making the big decisions such as which star systems the ship should explore, whether or not an alien species should be contacted, or whether or not to stand your ground or retreat in a hostile situation. How well you handle first contact situations will have a very real impact on how the mission plays out.
Pilot
Taking the Helm, as the ship's Pilot, you will be responsible for safely navigating the ship through space. You will also pilot the shuttles and other support craft as required by the current mission objectives.
Science Officer
Working on the Bridge and in the Science Labs, as a Scientist, you will be responsible for performing scans of stellar objects and analysing any gathered data. You'll also be performing tests on samples and artefacts acquired by the ship on its travels.
Tactical Officer
Working on the Bridge and around the ship, as a Tactical Officer you will be responsible for defending the ship and her crew. You'll man the tactical Bridge station during combat, and serve as the security detail on any away missions.
Engineer
Working in Engineering and around the ship, as an Engineer, you will be responsible for maintaining and repairing the ship's many systems. Keeping everything in tip-top condition will ensure the ship is always ready to meet any new challenge, but neglect your daily maintenance duties and critical systems will begin to fail.
Doctor
Working in the Medical Facility, the Doctor is responsible for the crew's physical wellbeing. You will be dealing with everything from simple cuts and bruises to strange alien pathogens that could infect the entire crew.
Morale Officer
Working in the Mess Hall as the ship's Chef you will be responsible for preparing healthy meals for the crew, but also as their Bartender, you will perform the important role of listening to their concerns and offering helpful advice. It's up to you to look after their mental health.
Passenger
As a guest aboard the ship, you will have no duties to perform, allowing you to simply relax and explore the ship at your leisure.
Articles
To say we're completely blown away by your support is the biggest understatement of the century. A week ago we were wondering if we'd even make it to our goal, and yet here we are just 72 hours into the campaign, and you guys have completely smashed it already!
It's just incredible, thank you all so much <3
We have so many exciting things planned for the game, so with 28 days left in the campaign let's see if we can hit some of those stretch goals.
If we make it to £140k, then we'll have the resources to go all-in on including native VR in the Early Access release. In addition to that, we'll be bringing a character specialist on board to completely overhaul our current character system to give it some AAA polish.
If the stars align and the wind blows in the right direction we might even make it to £300k, at which point we can complete our main vision and bring Planetary Landings forward into Early Access as well. Unreal Engine 5 has some mind-blowing tools for generating procedural outdoor environments, and we really can't wait to see how far we can push that technology.
Now that we're fully funded (I still can't believe it), we're going to be putting together a detailed roadmap for what happens next. We'll share that here when it's done, but in the meantime Dan is going to be hosting a Q&A stream on YouTube at 20:00 UTC on Monday 25th March. Be sure to tune in for that, because he was answering questions for 3 hours straight on the last one!
I'll close by saying a huge thank you again to everyone. You're making dreams come true, and we've all got an exciting journey ahead of us!
Our Kickstarter Campaign is now live!
NewsPlease help us grow our team, and bring you one of the most immersive space simulations ever!
Kickstarter Stretch Goal Success
NewsThe Second Kickstarter Goal has been funded. Now on to Planetary Landings!
1st Stretch goal has been reached!
NewsWe have passed our first Stretch goal, VR, in 8 days! We are absolutely over the moon( excuse the pun!) :D
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Fantastic project and idea!
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I think you can communicate the concept even better if you make an oblique Trekish reference in the paragraph at top right of Steam page e.g. "exploring new worlds, meeting new species, investigating anomalies, from the perspective of captain, crew or passenger.." Right now it doesn't mention aliens, and the "scientifically accurate Milky Way" bit makes it seems like the universe is empty of life bearing worlds.
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I saw you were involved with Stage 9 fan project, which got cancelled due to rampant corporate greed, film companies abusing the control they had over licenses and gateways. This project is a great way to avoid that.
To get the Stage 9 release to work these days, you need to block Epicgames addresses in the hosts file, since the unreal engine checks in with Epicgames. Unreal can just cancel a game license that way if they decide to.
I'd also suggest uploading Stage 9 to transformativeworks.org, and letting them archive it for posterity, or have their lawyers decide if it's fine to release it.
Given what happened with Stage 9, and the debacle with unity abusing the control they have, you should investigate the fully opensource and free Open3d engine (O3DE) :
.. Open3d.org
It's a fork of CryEngine/Lumberyard, the same as what Star Citizen started with - and contributed back fixes to for a time. But Star Citizen diverged and rewrote most of the engine, so it's no longer the Star Citizen engine. The Linux Foundation bought and released Lumberyard as free and opensource O3DE with a very permissive license (Apache 2.0).
O3DE is compatible with Linux which could get more contributors from the opensource scene. Especially if you make the engine source publicly available e.g. under a non-commercial license with upstream contributions under a dual private license so you can later go commercial, while keeping art assets closed source. You can also go GPL3, but this lets others sell other games with the engine (unlikely), provided they disclose engine modifications. O3DE works with mac too, as well as consoles.
If you port to O3DE from Unreal, there will never be any charge no matter how big the project gets, unless you contribute voluntarily to someone developing the engine. The source code is fully yours. You don't have to disclose changes at all, and can release code under a more restrictive license if you need to. So there won't be the situation like with Stage 9 where there are issues with past releases in Unreal that no longer work, as it needs online license verification.
The draw back might be the engine tools aren't as convenient as UE5.
O3DE can do open world environments well for ground missions, as it's CryEngine derived. Not sure how good the procedural tools are compared to UE5, but being opensource it can also link to any opensource tools. O3DE can handle large multiplayer, as Lumberyard is used in MMO New World.
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Funding
Since you're planning to give the game for free, you should talk with the Operation Harsh Doorstop devs about the way they fund the free FPS battlefield project. They use empty donation DLCs on steam, and also "sell" early development builds as DLCs, before it gets polished and integrated into the main game. They've opened their game up, so anyone can contribute, and get the community fully involved. They have a full time team that can exist indefinitely. Look at their steam page: Store.steampowered.com
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BTW, the steam hardware requirements says DX12 feature level 1 GPU. You guys should support DirectX on Windows 7, called 12on7, to increase your user base:
.. Learn.microsoft.com
You should check the game runs with DirectX12 on Vulkan, aka VK3d-proton (HansKristian fork on github). This is used for Steam OS and Linux to emulate D3D. Can be tested and used on Windows, but games have to look for correctly named Directx dlls in the executable folder instead of system locations. Supporting Vulkan natively is better, and would help with future compatibility on other platforms. If you release the game on consoles too, more people will find out about the project and donate through Steam or paypal.
Adding tech demo here and itch might get more visibility.
Good Luck!
Having worked in the space industry for 3 years, I'm hyped, this could be the most detail I've seen in ship systems so far :D If you need to sanity check anything feel free to hit me up, e.g. if I'm not mistaken the closing shot of the trailer shows a galaxy with too many spiral arms for the Milkyway - our latest estimate is it's a barred spiral with two arms ;)
been loving the playtest as basic as it is, the little touch you guys did with the windows changing to scenes was really well done
Thanks for trying it :)
So, so excited for this game! Thank you for making this Star Trek fan's dream come true! ^_^
Looks pretty cool.
Thanks! :)
may I correct your English in the upper summary? "born from many a childhood dreams" or "born from many-a-childhood's dreams", "born from many a dreams". Make it different from renowned leading games like Starship Citizen, Elite Dangerous, X4...as I saw it quite reminded me 2001: A Space Odissey.
Thank you for your comment. It is actually correct as it is but we truly appreciate your help :)
it's me, right...sorry xD I discovered that "many a" with singular nouns it's more idiomatic, and "born of" it's more formal...well carry on!