Pioneer – An Open Source space adventure game set in our galaxy | Hacker News Reader

Pioneer – An Open Source space adventure game set in our galaxy

pioneerspacesim.net

124 pointsghgr14 comments

Good effort, I personally would love to see multiplayer. Not necessarily massive multiplayer, but a way to explore the universe together. It’s not uncommon to hear “space madness” as a thing in Elite Dangerous when venturing out alone.

Looks nice though for people who want that original Elite feel.

Excellent choice of main computer in this cockpit design:

https://twitter.com/pioneerspacesim/status/15283868813559275...

The center console seems to be a Commodore VC-20:

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/4182678/169698135-...

Basically an open source modernized clone of David Braben's "Elite" or it's sequel "Frontier" (Elite II). First spaceship game I ever played way "back when"… Was so amazed that they managed to fit a whole freakin' galaxy onto a single floppy disc.

Actually, they didn't :)

Think of it as mathematical compression. The ability for math to create very large amounts of data from a simple starting point.

In their case they used a "random" number sequence, based on a specific seed. [1]

Storing the seed is trivial, but the sequence is infinitely long, so getting lots of data from that point is easy.

This approach doesn't let you compress a specific thing, but it does let you decompress something wonderful in a consistent way.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/oct/18/features.weeke...

Maybe it depends on your point of view?

I see the lines between procedural world generation and bespoke crafted worlds as somewhat arbitrary.

Eg, bespoke simulations have a finite custom form, but are yet also infinite, the custom constraints typically being things such as permissible movement or magnification.

In principle, without those constraints, you could also keep exploring infinitely, and similar to a procedural world, it'd become boring.

Conversely, in Elite, the vocabulary list, and various classifications of world features, are the custom, stored inputs. One could also keep "zooming" into them arbitrarily, but custom limits were placed on that.

Unfortunately, last I knew, saved games are valid only for the version of the game which creates them.

I recall playing freelancer in 2016, which back then was 16 years after the release of the game — the graphics and controls already felt pretty dated back then, yet I was still blown away by the game and the atmosphere it managed to create. The distinct factions, the music, amazing game.

Space sims are of course about space flight, but they are also about showing utopian and dystopian societies and how people made a home in space. How specific architecture looks like, what culture developed (e.g. bars and trucker like culture) and so on. This is the part that interests me more than most other things.

I wonder how I would think about it now, in 2023.

Freelancer was amazing, the visuals of flying close to planets, the simple control of the ship. Played it when it came out. Can anyone recommend something similar but newer? A lot of space sims are complicated and with age I’ve lost the patience to get into complicated games.

I couldn't figure out what the license is from a glance.

There's a directory with a lot of licenses ?for third party resources? but no LICENSE file in the root of the repository.

FAQ doesn't answer this either.

Is this really Open Source?

All the source files start with:

// Licensed under the terms of the GPL v3. See licenses/GPL-3.txt

GPL-3, so it is open source.

I wish I could play this on a Mac. Maybe just best to get a second Linux box for several reasons.

Strange, the game doesn't seem to support a full-screen view.

Oops, my bad. Of course it supports full screen.

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