Time on planets, time in your ship, time everywhere

Recently I got stuck thinking about time, this is a thing that has not been addressed in any other game the way I am looking at it. On earth you have 24 hours day and you can have a similar time scale while traveling in your space ship, so time can be managed easily and assign duties to your crew and create day/night shifts as needed, no issues, but now, what if you go to a planet that has a very long day/night cycle? how will the natives will behave?

I haven't seen any game in which time is a game factor in that sense, most games will just default to a 24 hour cycle and NPCs will just go to their beds and sleep and come back to work the next day, but if a planet has 100 hours per day, how will the NPCs behave? time to sleep every 18 hours for example? so all the planet will be adjusted into a 24 hour cycle with a 100 hour day? if that happens then there will be days in which what is supposed to be early morning will be a complete darkness because it just happened to be in the middle of the planet's night. And what will happen if the planet has a 5 hour day/night cycle? or worst case scenario 200 years of light/night?

After doing more and more research, I figure out that there is no simple answer to this question yet, human will eventually leave earth to other planets but we haven't figure out yet how we, as a human race, will manage time in other planets, and this is becoming an issue with the game, since I can't really seem to find an easy solution to something that looks trivial, how to measure time and divide it properly.

So the first solution that came to my mind seems to be to divide the planet's time as close as a multiple of 24 and adjust the internal people clock to that multiple, so if a planet's day/night cycle is 12 hours, the NPCs will live in one day with day/night cycle plus 4 hours to get a full day in which they are awake because the total is 16 hours, and the rest 8 hours will be time to sleep, that will give us a night of sleep with light and darkness. But now if the planet has a day of 100 years the local time will be divided in 24 hours as usual and let people sleep as usual even in plain light or darkness, most probably same as the people that live in the poles.

Another solution that came to my mind is to make seconds faster or slower, so it will be still 24 hours but each second will be faster or slower than we normally perceive, so for a 100 year day/night cycle each second will be very long, and for planets with a day/night cycle of few hours each second will be a lot faster, problem will be that trying to stay awake for 8 hours in some planets will be impossible.

The other solution is to let the time run in the planet, so if a 50 hour day happens let native people live and sleep in cycles as needed without any schedule , just live and do what they can in any cycle so no single person in the planet will run under the same clock and just live, this is the easiest way but not very nice. What's the implication about this solution? since shops will run by NPC, if the NPC goes to sleep and the player goes to the shop and it is closed, how will you know when is the shop going to open? and what will happen if you have many shops you want to visit but all of them are open at different times? this doesn't looks good from business point of view, but the easiest to implement, if a NPC close a shop to go to sleep, then it will post the time it will open again and this will solve the issue. So until a more elegant solution is found I will stick with this one for the time being, now it is time to implement this solution.

Enjoying your trip in space, allowing your crew to relax

This week added arcade machines. Arcade machines will help your crew cope with the long travel in space but not everyone enjoys doing the same things, some may enjoy to play games, while other may enjoy running around, eating, gardening etc... many more activities to add so your crew can relax!

You can now see your crew's traits , likes and hates so you can plan accordingly.

Installing new hardware in your ship

You can buy new hardware to improve or add functionality to your ship, but buying is not the only thing that matters, your crew will have to install the hardware and the time until the hardware is ready for use will depend on the technical expertise of your crew members, some items will require weeks until fully active, while others a few minutes.

You will be able to see the progress on the brown boxes containing the new shiny upgrade of your ship and see as well who is working on that equipment, also the crew member working on it will gain some experience over time and the more time your crew spent installing or fixing the more proficient will be on those tasks.

You will be also be able to select what to install first or assign specific crew member to install hardware as desired.

So the next time you purchase something, think first if your crew is capable of installing it at a reasonable time otherwise the wait can be very long.

Planetary landing continues

It took a little bit of time to get this working properly, but now very big maps are created on the fly and the player will be able to explore large areas, part of the game will take place on land where away teams will have to explore.

Here is a better screenshot of a desert biome with some rocks and plants. Planets will be different in many ways, like the day/night cycle depending on the rotation speed of the planet, gravity will affect how fast/slow your crew will be able to walk, weather will also be part of the game and will affect your crew, in the screenshot below the desert will affect how confortable your crew will be since the hot and dry environment may cause a lot of stress for some crew members.

A closer look of your character in desert.

There will be a wide variety of biomes to explore, more to come soon.

Planetary landing progress

It has been quite a while since the last update, planetary landing is the next big module in the game and it took a lot of trials to make it look good enough and it is getting better by each day. Just to illustrate the progress made in the past few weeks here are a few screenshots with some brief details.

This is a brief summary in weeks...

And here are the details

1- First a tile map for easy terrain management similar to space ships but it didn't look so well. It means a lot of tiles to be made manually and the work will take years to complete if I wanted to incorporate all the biomes planned, and it looked flat

2- Next step was to make soft transitions on the terrain so those ugly blocks will go away. A little bit better but not by much, still flat looking and the tile was really visible. It was not at the level I wanted it to be.

3-So the next logical step was to unblock the map and make it look more organic, after a week of playing with shaders and a little bit more of work the map became a lot better like below, but still looked a little bit flat.

4- This week changed the logic again and added lights to modify the terrain, the result can be seen below.

Terrain is becoming better each day, so some more biomes will be shown later once all the parametric values are automated, each map terrain belongs to a part in the planet and all are procedurally generated, so the variety will be vast. After plain and simple terrains are finished, cities will added so you can roam around any city, any place in a planet to accomplish your mission.

Procedural planets!

A few weeks ago during the holidays decided to add procedural planets in 3d to the game, I was looking at flat textures of planets and gas giants and I didn't feel confortable with that, so I just added terran type planets and now working on gas giants. Here you can see below a few examples.

And a first gas giant produced today.

There will be many more planet types and moons to explore, you will need to have shuttles in your main ship to land on those places and explore them! since all data is procedurally generated the terrain will be also based on the planet information already created.

A better version of another gas giant.

Happy holidays and Merry Christmas!

This year has been a very interesting one with lots of new ideas put in game and a lot of game mechanics that were not initially thought in the scope of the game, but it is giving it a lot of fun and allowing me to build the game that I want to play.

Enjoy the holidays and wish you Merry Christmas!

My crew is also celebrating and looking forward for the alpha release next year! see you soon!