Microsoft Space Simulator (Or, Charles Guy’s Galaxy in a Box) | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Space Simulator (Or, Charles Guy’s Galaxy in a Box)

filfre.net

114 pointsdoppp26 comments

I have been working on a realistic scale space simulator (working title, Space Freighters) that I like to describe as a "truck simulator in space." [0] The focus is currently in creating a simulator with realistic spaceflight physics (I am an aerospace engineer by day), that also allows you to bend some rules with options for FTL travel. I am striving for a calm gameplay similar to the truck simulator franchises in which the player can deliver cargo and take time to admire the universe around them.

The project is still young, and I do not have a lot to share at the moment, but if you are interested, you can follow along on the subreddit below!

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceFreighters/

This description sounds a bit like Elite II: Frontier. I remember enjoying it greatly back in the day. The entire game fit on one floppy.

Or Elite: Dangerous.

I really love the idea of a calm game. I have been looking for something to do with friends that isn’t a 100% of attention hostile fight fest...

Did you ever play Galactic Empire or Galactic Trader, from the early days of classic Macintosh? Emphasis on strategy rather than a simulation of stellar travel, they may provide inspiration for your work.

Check out github.com/endless-sky/endless-sky

A mining simulator with realistic physics ΔV: Rings of Saturn: https://koder.itch.io/dv-rings-of-saturn

Charles Guy was my uncle. I've done research myself but this post has details I did not know and quotes I have never heard. It was very enjoyable to read.

What a small world (internet?)

Do you have any interesting anecdotes about your uncle?

He died when I was 10 or 11 and lived across the country so I didn't have as much time with him as I would have liked. The times when he came home to see the family were always pleasant. He and my father were an entertaining pair. We visited him once or twice in California after he was diagnosed with cancer. He definitely passed his interest in computers and astronomy on to me along with his taste for electronic and industrial music. The first computer I had to myself was passed down from him. I still have a framed panorama of the milky way galaxy he gave me.

I have to say, several of those quotes were very moving which I didn't expect in an article about a 'game'. I feel like I need to check out this Space Simulator now.

The blog this article appears on is unusual (in the best ways) as well as extremely long and extensive (see https://www.filfre.net/sitemap/).

If you're interested in a history of computer games I'd suggest checking it out - it will take a long time to read it all but even just jumping to the articles that sound most interesting will easily fill up your free time for the next year.

Yet no one else has given you a spacecraft and then just set you loose to go explore the natural wonders of our galaxy with it, thereby giving you a more embodied sort of window onto our staggeringly magnificent and terrifyingly immense universe than any planetarium can hope to create.

Honestly this was what I loved about the initial version of No Man's Sky. It didn't have any pretense to realism but it really worked well as a non-game about just being a tiny speck in a galaxy much, much larger than you can really begin to comprehend.

Every update added more "gameplay" and made the player feel more important. And I guess that's more of what people want. But there was a magic to the pre-patch NMS that it's lost, and it's pretty much what that quote describes.

If you'd like to play the game :-)

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Microsoft_Space_Simulator_...

A bit related:

During the holiday season I wanted to spend some time playing a game the supports Ubuntu & Windows and found Surviving Mars. I hadn't played a game like it since Outpost, but I am impressed the quality and found it enjoyable to play: https://www.paradoxplaza.com/surviving-mars/SUSM01GSK-MASTER...

Oh, Paradox... I'll have to give this one a try! I haven't had that itch rightly scratched since staring at tiny videos crammed onto the Outpost CD-ROM and writing the detailed narratives in my head.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outpost_(1994_video_game)

Edit: I forgot how epic the intro was. Especially for 1994 DOS. Did not forget the music. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NtfmvwyHuNs&t=21

It's a shame Dune II pivoted the market to RTS or bust by the time Outpost II came out.

It looks like Surviving Mars is on Xbox Game Pass. Downloading now. Thanks!

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/surviving-mars/bxc7cs90nx6...

Try Per Aspera. Another good Mars colonization game.

And Factorio is great for base building too.

Ha, I had this game when I was a kid. There was a section in the manual about pointing your spacecraft towards a star 26 light years away, set its speed to the speed of light, and letting your PC run for 26 years, it would simulate the trip accurately.

And here we are, 26 years later...

Edit: well, the download has the manual as a PDF, it doesn't mention "26 light years", ah, how my memory deceived me!

Has you heard about of NASA's "42" spacecraft simulation game?[0]

[0] https://sourceforge.net/projects/fortytwospacecraftsimulatio...

Whoa... opened the article and saw the screenshots and had a total nostalgia flashback. Microsoft Space Simulator was one of the only "video games" that my parents let me have, back in the day.

Can anyone suggest a collaborative multiplayer game in the same vein? (Apart from No Man's Sky which is the only title I know already)?

Especially during lockdown I am trying to convince geographically disperse friends to spend some time playing together and most of them don't really like competitive/combat games

Elite: Dangerous?

I will investigate, thanks!

Since this game is long-since "out of print", what are the chances of MS releasing the source? Are there any groups/orgs doing that sort of advocacy and outreach?

I don't remember this game at all, but it sounds like it would have been a fun follow up to The Halley Project, which was kind of a scavenger hunt through the solar system.

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