Loadstar Devlog - Alpha 4 - Hyperspace & the Galaxy

Loadstar Devlog - Alpha 4 - Hyperspace & the Galaxy 🌌

As I approach the one year mark in development of Loadstar, I have completed alpha 4 which is focussed on hyperspace and the galaxy. This is a big milestone for me and something I have been looking forward to building since starting this project.

Also is this the only galaxy emoticon? 🌌 pretty disappointing...

Generating a fake "real" galaxy

Before I could get hyperspace working, we need somewhere to hyperspace to. I have a lot of fond memories of exploring the milky way in Elite 2 and it was really important to me that Loadstar be set in a realistic(ish) milky way galaxy. I decided to find use real star types and positions and then randomly generate the planets inside these systems. We're in the age of exoplanet discovery but of course we don't yet have the complete picture for any extrasolar star systems so I decided to leave known exoplanets out for now.

While random generation is great to fill out the galaxy, it's no substitute for hand-crafted content so Loadstar's galaxy map combines both, allowing me to describe specific star systems manually and then filling in the blanks with procedural generation. Loadstar can also support totally random galaxies with different parameters for replayability.

Local star data from SIMBAD ready to go into Loadstar

In alpha 4 I have populated the galaxy everywhere within 100 parsecs (~326 light years) of Earth. I did this using the astronomical database SIMBAD an absolutely fantastic free database of star data. I wrote a pipeline to query stars from this database and transform them into a 2D map of the local galaxy containing over 13 thousands stars. In future I hope to build out the rest of the galaxy including other notable stars further from home.

Handling lots of stars

Worlds & Factions

The vega system

Each system contains planets and moons. How many and how big these planets are depends upon the size and mass of the star or stars (some are binary or ternary systems). The temperature of planets depends upon the temperature of the star and the planet's distance, along with any greenhouse effect and its reflectiveness. If a planet has enough mass it will have an atmosphere leading to earthlike worlds, water and desert worlds. The population (if any) of a planet along with what kind of economy it has depends upon the type of planet and its temperature.

Planet details

I wanted the galaxy to be largely uninhabited but with pockets of civilisation within it. I decided to create factions and give each faction a location and spread within the galaxy. This means Loadstar will have multiple powers vying for control of the galaxy, each with a homeworld and territory. I plan to flesh this out further in up-coming versions as I build out careers, story, missions etc.

Each system has an allegiance

## Hyperspace

With a galaxy (or at least a big chunk of it) generated I turned to getting hyperspace working. What is a sci-fi without some good old fashioned hyperspace. I created some hyperspace drives and integrated these into all the existing ship loadouts and after a bit of head scratching came up with a hyperspace equation to workout how far a ship can jump, and how much fuel and time will it cost? The time taken to hyperspace will become an important decision point once career features are added to the game.

Old school hyperspace

It's now possible to hyperspace your way out of combat if you're in trouble (once the drive is powered and charged up) and I had a lot of fun creating an old school hyperspace animation using Godot's particles effects.

Next up

The last core area of gameplay I want to improve before moving onto the higher-level career aspects of the game is in-system space travel. I plan to add traffic to the solar system so you can see and avoid undesirables, hunt down and pirate cargo ships or smuggle cargo past a police patrol. I think is the last piece of the puzzle for the core gameplay in Loadstar!

Thanks for reading, see you in the future.

Follow on the official Loadstar Discord server - discord.gg/bGPab7CXxp