Pioneer Space Sim

You may recall my disposition toward an ancient game called Frontier-Elite II. As a representation of our galaxy it was unmatched in scope, ambition and technical accomplishment. However, as our appetite for the visually sublime has snowballed, Frontier has not aged well.

Fortunately I am not the only freak passionate about such a sim and therefore a fan-made version is currently in development. I am pleased to link the alpha version which is fully playable, if a little unstable.


A Venusian sunrise - pressure 13.82 bar.


An ancient valley orbiting a gas giant.


Scoping for a landing site.



It's worth noting that Pioneer uses Fractal mathematics to generate its worlds. A great deal of trust has been put into the equations and it's very effective. There have been times I have been utterly astonished at the visuals produced by this homage. Every world is generated procedurally and it's this approach to simulating the cosmoss which is simple yet incredibly powerful.

A word of warning; as this is an alpha - save often and try not to run much else simultaneously for the best performance.

Related Links
Pioneer Space Sim (alpha download)
Frontier - Elite II
Chaos Pro (fractal generator)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dude... this is so awesome. Indie games FTW.

Anonymous said...

I'm very interested in space sims. In my high school days, I loved Microsoft Space Simulator. Graphics in space were pretty good, but on planets mostly weren't so good. Wish that was still being developed; over 12 years of graphic improvements and today it probably would be awesome.

I'll try out this Pioneer Space Sim; should be interesting how it develops.

Shandir said...

Much like the original series used procedurally generated universes and planets, so they could make genuinely collossal universes in a tiny bit of RAM and HD space.