Update log
Full Starship Simulator update
The complete published notes, normalized for clean reading and source attribution.
Extracted changes
- Gameplay
- Performance
We're a couple of weeks late, but I'd like to say a belated Happy New Year to everyone! It's that time again where we take stock of what we've achieved over the past year, and then look ahead to what we have planned for 2025.
In terms of progress, in 2024 we released a total of 57 development builds for our backer community to check out, with a release cadence of 1-2 new builds per week during the latter half of the year.
We also launched a new series of regular live development streams, with a total of 96 live streams in 2024. That's over 128 hours worth of live development action, with most streams averaging 3-4 hours long. If you haven't been watching, then why not join the fun every Wednesday and Sunday on YouTube:
Of course, the biggest news of the year by far was our unbelievably successful Kickstarter campaign in April, where 5,761 backers pledged a mind-blowing £402,085. After the usual fees and tax deductions, that was a £290,000 cash injection into the studio, which we're using to bring additional talent onto the project.
In other news, thanks to our other fantastic backers on Patreon and Ko-Fi, we were able to construct our brand new "Dev Shed", a dedicated studio space for development and streaming.
As for the game itself, during 2024 we focused on several core features;
GALAXY GEN
We completely overhauled the Galaxy Gen system, adding refinement and optimisation across the board. The coordinate system was re-based to place Sag A* at 0,0,0, and thanks to a new seed system with 2^256 unique vector-based seeds (a truly massive number), every cubic lightyear of space now has its own unique seed.
We also significantly increased the number of real-world stars in the game, with 18.2 million Gaia Catalogue Objects now extending out to a radius of 2,000 LY around Sol. Without wanting to blow our own trumpet too much, this makes our simulated Milky Way galaxy the largest and most accurate ever made for the consumer market, and we're only just getting started!
To help render all of that new data, we also added L, T and Y class brown dwarf stars to the game, along with over 70 new stellar sub-classes.
SYSTEM GEN
Just as with the Galaxy Gen, we completely overhauled the code for generating Star Systems within the game. In addition to numerous optimisations, we also added significantly more detail to the generation process. Here are a few highlights:
Our planet formation model now uses Core Mass Accretion when forming initial planetary cores, with iron content properly decreasing with distance from the central star.
Gas Giants are now formed using Runaway Gas Accretion, whereby the gas envelope grows exponentially when the escape velocity of the planetary core is greater than that of molecular hydrogen.
A star's Roche Limit is now properly taken into account when generating the innermost planets in a system, along with that star's Dust Sublimation Line. This ensures the orbits of the innermost planets are scientifically accurate.
Once a star's proto-planetary disk has been largely exhausted of mass, a Scattered Disk of small icy bodies is generated with increasingly eccentric and inclined orbits. This is similar to our own Kuiper Belt, which includes the likes of Pluto, Eris, Haumea and Makemake. All of which are also now in the game.
LIFE GEN
We started work on our Life Gen system, which now applies a high-level
Source