For what it's worth, I own the first version of this and while it's interesting, it doesn't grip me in the way a game needs to. It's something you mess around with for a bit, enjoy, then forget. Might be really useful in trying to create a universe for a fiction, say, but I feel you need some personal motivation to play this (I didn't find my initial 'that's interesting and cool' was enough over time).
I think that's a pretty apt description of any sandbox game. Some people find the genre really fun and interesting, but it's really a matter of preference.
The genre is interesting in that it includes stuff that could barely be considered a game (more like toys). No progression, goals, challenge or reward really. But then there are some like SimCity which I would consider more engaging than most games of any genre.
> I think it depends on how creative you are. I wouldn't describe myself as creative, and I am not a big fan of sandbox style games.
I don't think it depends on how creative you are; I think it depends on what kind of experience you are looking for in a video game.
I think everyone enjoys being creative to an extent, everyone enjoys more analytical thinking to an extent and everyone enjoys more instinctive activities that create a state of "flow" to an extent. These extents vary from person to person and can be very large or very small.
But equally, everyone's daily life, job and routine requires creativity, analytical thinking and instinctual behaviour to greater and lesser degrees.
The kind of video games people enjoy can't be divided simply into "games for creative people" and "games for analytical people". The kind of experiences people seek out or enjoy are a result of the complex interplay between their natural proclivities and how those proclivities are stimulated, drained or left idle by the rest of their lives.
I wonder if this can simulate the view of the sky from a planet's surface, given an interesting planetary system. I'd like to simulate what the day/night phases look like on the namesake planet of Kim Stanley Robinson's "Aurora" that I have just read... the moon orbiting a super-earth itself orbiting Tau Ceti.
Or for that matter, the planet in some science fiction novel (can't remember the name) that orbits in some weird trinary (or higher) system and only has nightfall once a century (triggering a social breakdown everytime it occurs).
What you want is Space Engine [en.spaceengine.org/]. Also a sandbox. Allows you to fly from star to star, galaxy to galaxy, with billions of planets, nebulae, black holes, clusters, etc. to choose from.
As an example: tonight I had a few minutes to kill so I visited a small desert (Mars-like) planet with a thin ring located in an orbit around dual stars located in a globular cluster. By day, one sun rose and then another. Absolutely scorching the broad plains and distant mountains. Night eventually fell and the sky was burning with the crimson light of the thousands of red giants in the cluster and the brilliant white light of the galactic center. The light was broken slightly by the silhouette of the rings' arc overhead. Was quite beautiful.
My favorite feature of Universe Sandbox is completely silly. It's the light pulse. You can send out a pulse at the speed of light and watch it expand and overtake other bodies.
It's really nifty for visualizing just how slow light speed really is in a cosmic sense.
> According to the nebular hypothesis, the outer two planets are in the "wrong place". Uranus and Neptune (known as the "ice giants") exist in a region where the reduced density of the solar nebula and longer orbital times render their formation highly implausible. The two are instead thought to have formed in orbits near Jupiter and Saturn, where more material was available, and to have migrated outward to their current positions over hundreds of millions of years.
I don't expect that it get exactly the current situation, but at least that it's possible to see something similar.
If this had oculus or some other VR support I would be in 100%. I love an N body physics sim, especially one with nice graphics, so I would pay dearly to be able to experience it at full scale. It's a lifelong dream.
Can you create a focused, high intensity gamma ray burst and blast a planet with it? What about sending a white dwarf careening through our solar system?
We appreciate your concern for the integrity of the threads here, but it's against HN's rules to accuse other users of astroturfing without evidence. Asking insinuating questions is just a milder version of accusing, so it's covered by the same rule.
Enthusiastic comments don't count as evidence, especially when the accounts have histories of commenting on lots of other things.
For the avoidance of doubt, I really genuinely was not meaning to accuse or insinuate. When I said I expected the answers to be "no" and "none", I meant it.
Still, the rules are the rules, and I'm sorry I apparently broke them. I will refrain from asking such questions in the future.
(I've just checked the guidelines and the FAQ and don't see any such prohibition. I see things like "be civil" and "avoid gratuitous negativity", but so far as I can tell I didn't violate those. Is there some other place where I could have learned that I wasn't supposed to say what I did?)
But we haven't added it to the site guidelines yet. I suppose we should, but we try to err on the side of avoiding bloat. Maybe we can treat them like code and find something else in there that can be removed.
I'm not sure, but to me it looks more a bad coincidence that some astroturfing attempt.
hoag: is the original poster with an old account. In some other sites it's common that the OP makes a vacuous comment about how great the story is. Here is less common luckily, but I've seen a few recently.
zanewill9: is a new account. The comment is too exalting and it raises a red flag for me. But if you read the history of the comments of that account, they cover many independent stories and are relevant to each story. So I guess it legit. (Or an extremely good suckpupet.)
I'll chime in that I own the first version, it's great and I have no idea how I bought it, maybe directly or in a bundle. But it's been in my Steam library for a long time.
This isn't like Reddit, self promotion is encouraged. I don't think it's a rule violation as-is, but it's kind of funny, because I don't think, if this is actually astroturfing, it's necessary to lie about it. You can simply say, "We made a thing, check it out" on HN.
I prefer seeing stuff directly from the creator. It gives you a chance to enage them with any questions you have. I also like to see it first on HN. More Show HNs, please.
Dan Dixon, the sole author of Universe Sandbox -- he spent three unpaid years writing it alone -- and the lead developer of its rewrite (and founder of Giant Army, which employs a few developers, an astronomer, and even a climatologist), is one of the most honest, forthright people in gaming. Seriously, HN would love his story if you bothered to look. They're not a hypergrowth startup and have traditionally eschewed many forms of marketing. I realize the concept of an aboveboard, mostly marketing-free gaming studio without a growth team or investors or a bottom line and funded entirely by sales of an unexpected hit is foreign on Hacker News, but believe it or not, there is reality outside this valley. Their press kit is a DIY template, for crying out loud; you really, honestly think they're astroturfing a non-gaming Web site like Hacker News?
Universe Simulator is impressive software that does mostly arbitrary N-body at acceptable performance on a workstation (itself a technical feat), it was written by a single individual (again, a feat), and more than that, it's an educational tool disguised as a game which broke into multiple markets unexpectedly. Your comment is hilariously out of place to anyone who remotely follows the gaming world at all. I've always viewed Dan Dixon as a great bootstrapping success story and an example of following through on an idea to the end, when many would have given up long before the success he has found.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that people are willing to make accusations (sorry, "questions" about a financial relationship to spam a message board, which smell a lot like accusations despite your claim to the contrary) about people and organizations they've never heard of based upon a significant number of bad actors in the world, but sometimes a little research wouldn't hurt. There are far too many column inches devoted to these "questions," and far too many people upvoting you, so the irony of your taking on perceived astroturfing is that you've successfully and completely derailed the thread.
Yes I have and don't lie. The steam logo should be enough to tell anyone that what you're buying is an "all access pass to the steam service". Further than that, might I direct your attention here http://universesandbox.com/faq/#purchase specifically this paragraph https://archive.is/aKZD7#selection-1333.0-1347.254 where they quite clearly say steam is required and that they haven't decided whether it will be drm free at some point.
You've posted many uncivil comments to Hacker News, and we've asked you not to do this before. If you can't or won't stop, we're going to ban your account.
Steam is DRM. Can't play without having authenticated. It infects everything or damn near everything these days. Steam is trying very hard to get a monopoly. They want to lock out competition. They want to control everything you may do with the game you bought (rented might be a better verb).
Because of all that what more reason is needed to not buy a particular game?
It's up to the publisher, you can have a completely DRM free game on Steam. For instance, I just copied the FTL game recently from my Steam install folder to my netbook to play on a trip. Steam has never been installed on it.
Indeed, but it is true that Steam has no indication whatsoever when you download a game (or buy one) whether it's DRM-free or not. It's not explicit in any way.
