
Pioneer: a game of lonely space adventure - mabynogy
https://pioneerspacesim.net
======
montecarl
Just reading the discription of this game and it reminds me of Escape Velocity
Nova[1]. I spent a long time playing this game in high school. It felt so epic
in its scope at the time. I have no idea how popular it was. Did anyone else
play this?

[1]
[https://www.ambrosiasw.com/games/evn/](https://www.ambrosiasw.com/games/evn/)

~~~
freeqaz
Dude... I played every story line and eventually wrote some mods. This game is
likely the reason I'm a dev today!

Definitely check out Endless Sky for a modern engine! [https://endless-
sky.github.io](https://endless-sky.github.io)

~~~
flashman
Currently trying to capture robot-controlled ships to replace my human-crewed
ships, to bring down my expenditure on crew salaries.

If I might digress for a minute, Endless Sky inherits Escape Velocity's very
20th-century American approach to economics and labour. The primary money-
making activities are commodities arbitrage and freelance gigs (cargo and
passenger transport). Crews are paid a fixed rate and can be sent to their
deaths in a boarding party without mutinous consequences. There is no concept
of anyone's welfare besides the player-captain.

Where's the fully automated luxury gay space communism? It suffers from a
slight lack of imagination.

~~~
vidarh
I've toyed with a sci-fi novel, and while "worldbuilding" what quickly becomes
clear if you're going to do "space opera" type environments that are even
somewhat realistic is that you have relatively few sets of choices that
drastically constrain your setting.

You're right there's a lack of imagination there, but it's also limited by the
setting.

E.g. you have to choose FTL or no-FTL. If you choose no-FTL you're basically
limited to a single solar system at most, so whether or not you believe FTL
may become possible, for a space sim it's pretty much a requirement.

You need to rule out the singularity or people opting to "upload" to a
computer in any significant proportion of the population.

You also have to decide if you believe scarcity will still exist. If you
decide we'll all automate everything, then the only route to scarcity is that
someone is hoarding everything or is running out of raw materials.

That's a potentially interesting setting, but has significant impacts on space
sim type trade: Nobody would be hauling [insert whatever] manufactured goods
from Earth to Mars if it can be manufactured by robots right there. Refined
materials, maybe, or people. Mining asteroids, certainly. But not shipping
foods of all things, for example. But such a setting would also need e.g.
significant costs of raw materials and difficulty obtaining tech to automate
manufacturing, or the chokehold would slip fairly quickly.

If you rule out automation you've made a choice that's decidedly anti-tech: it
presupposes technological stagnation at some point, or that it is slow enough
that scarcity is still there at whatever point in time you've chosen, in which
case you accordingly need to reflect that in an environment that does not have
all kinds of super-fancy technology.

Most space sims end up in that last category: Automation, if it exists, is
limited and doesn't affect manufacture and trade enough to be worth mentioning
to the point where there are still arbitrage opportunities for small ships;
FTL exists, but most other tech seems to have largely stagnated.

Part of the problem, I think, is that these choices makes it easiest to create
a frontier feel, and space sims tends to very much be westerns in space
(incidentally, "space opera" is derived from "horse opera": a term for a very
cliched western).

Exceptions mostly come when you add story elements that let you add e.g. large
capital ships and the like and armed forces, such as games like Terminus, that
lets you join military units or be a rebel etc.

Thinking outside that box and still have a compelling story is difficult,
because it means overcoming a lot of barriers. E.g. let's say you drop FTL.
Now we're stuck, unless you find some way of setting your game in the kind of
accelerated timeframe that it would take for non-FTL travel to be viable, but
hen you also need a setting where that "works" which would be decidedly non-
human.

Let's say you admit to people "uploading". Now you need a compelling reason
why people stay human, or you'll have a Clifford D. Simak "City" situation on
your hands (a bunch of dogs tell each other stories about humans, who have
long since left Earth behind, not to "upload", but the effect being the same).

No scarcity? Now you need another mechanism than basic commodities trade.

But the "trade plus occasional piracy" model is very simple. Thinking up
variations that doesn't immediately seem flawed and idiotic that solves the
above issues is a _lot_ harder.

Don't blame these games for it; blame sci-fi authors who _also_ have not
explored this very well, with a few exceptions.

E.g. Iain M. Banks is one of the few authors of what you describe with the
"fully automated luxury gay space communism" meme. I'd love to see someone
adapt ideas from that into a game. But it also presents a lot of difficulties
because his solution to make it interesting is alternatively go up in scale
(e.g. the Idiran war, described with destruction of entire habitats housing
billions) and down in scale, focusing on specific conflicts involving specific
people that might suit e.g. a more complex graphical adventure type game, but
that'd be hard to adapt to a space sim. Notably his books have a lot more
scenes of people conspiring or doing stuff on the surface than they have of
people flying space ships. Because why would you fly a space ship when you can
hitch a ride on a Mind controlled ship the size of a city in according
comfort? There are reasons, but again they require a lot more thinking and
making that work in an open world game as opposed to a story led one would
probably be tricky.

One interesting other approach is Frederik Pohl's Gateway. It's set on an
alien space station far from earth in a future where _humanity_ does not have
FTL, but this alien race that mysteriously left thousands of years ago did
have FTL. The lack of FTL + Gateway's distance means there's a lot of scarcity
_on Gateway_ irrespective of conditions on Earth. At the same time, Gateway is
the literal gateway to a massive number of alien locations via FTL ships that
humans haven't figured out to control other than to start them, wait for them
to reach their destination, and trigger a return trip. Which means it's
basically prospecting where the lucky ones bring back untold fortunes in alien
artifacts.

Creative thinking on introducing constraints the way Gateway did is, I think,
something that has great potential for more interesting variety in space sims
(since I mentioned Banks above, two of his other novels demonstrates this: In
"the Algebraist" the setting is a solar system that has been cut off from its
surroundings from a century after their local jump gate was destroyed; they're
waiting for a replacement sent from the nearest system at sublight speeds -
the tech is implied to use entanglement, so they can't just build a new local
gate; in "Against a Dark Background" the system is isolated far away from any
nearby galaxies, basically crushing any fantasy of interstellar travel)

~~~
edraferi
Bravo! I’m going to check out some of these.

Huge fan of the culture series. It’s very interesting to see how Banks
portrays humans in a scarcity-free society. A lot of the conflict centers on
what you’re supposed to _do_ with all the free time.

------
EpicEng
ok... don't use a new URL for each image in your slideshow please. You're just
breaking browser navigation.

On topic: cool idea, but heard it before. The amount of effort it would take
to _truly_ pull this off is just enormous. I wish them the best, but I've been
burned before (you know who you are... Sean.)

~~~
applecrazy
To be fair, the game you referenced improved with several free updates, not to
mention an extensive ARG that hyped up the first anniversary update,
essentially delivering the game that was expected on launch day.

I am of the opinion that it was Sony's fault for rushing development of an
indie game (the studio had 10 ppl max working on the game at any given time).

~~~
EpicEng
> To be fair, the game you referenced improved with several free updates

To be fair, it _still_ doesn't have the totality of features they promised at
launch, even with all of those updates, and Sean blatantly lied while
promoting the thing right up to launch day. "Fair" is the reception they got.

Besides, the game is still boring.

~~~
Will_Parker
(I'll take your point.)

~~~
EpicEng
That is not at all what happened. Sean was on television and streams telling
people that NMS contained features which simply didn't exist only days/weeks
prior to release. No one knew it was BS until they bought the game.

------
wiz21c
For those who wonder, the great music is by Wagner (Siegried's march) :
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uka8ykFDw2U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uka8ykFDw2U)

This was used with great effect in the movie Excalibur by John Boorman

------
duck
Ah,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier:_Elite_II](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier:_Elite_II)
was a great game... one of many that I've forgotten about, so it is nice to
see a reminder like this.

------
gabrielcsapo
This looks awesome! The graphics remind me of
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Legacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Legacy)
which was one of my favorite games!

------
JepZ
One of my favorite space simulators was Netwars by Novell (3D, multiplayer,
from 1993):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a30Fwd-
gisI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a30Fwd-gisI)

------
shmerl

        /home/your_username/.pioneer 
    

Hm. They'd better use XDG base directory spec.

------
kazagistar
Noctis 4 was a game I played extensively when I was a bit younger. No Mans Sky
is one I thoroughly enjoyed for the same reasons more recently, and still pick
up everyone once in a while. Unfortunately, that means that unless a game
brings something new to the table, the "market is saturated" from my
perspective, and the site provides very little to go on.

------
shrimp_emoji
So this is to Elite Dangerous what FreeOrion is to Stellaris?

~~~
astrobe_
Oolite is a closer match for Elite Dangerous. Also FOSS and 500+ mods
available. One of the devs made a one-click install for Windows featuring a
selection of the main eye-candy mods but I'm on mobile now; will provide the
link later.

Oolite is more like the original Elite while Pioneer is more like Frontier.
Although I'm a former flightsim player who likes "realism", I find Oolite and
its non-newtonian physics more enjoyable because you don't spend your time on
autopilot and time acceleration. Space is just so big that, in a way, it
disolves agency so it's better IMO to compromise and switch to a "believable"
rather than "realistic" universe.

~~~
astrobe_
The link to the "demo" distribution is here:
[http://www.aegidian.org/bb/viewtopic.php?f=8&p=260064#p26006...](http://www.aegidian.org/bb/viewtopic.php?f=8&p=260064#p260064)

Or else the official distribution can be found here:
[http://www.oolite.org/](http://www.oolite.org/)

Also, the mods are scripted with Javascript (including most of the AI for
NPCs). The API is documented here:
[http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Scripting_Oolite_with_JavaS...](http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Scripting_Oolite_with_JavaScript)

------
acavalcante80
Think about accept Bitcoins as donation. Thanks for creating games for Linux!

~~~
carlosgj94
I thought the same! I was like: Cool I will them send some satoshi, but
then... :(

~~~
laarmen
While much appreciated, we don't need money so much as helping hands ;-)

------
jmatthews
Off topic but your website needs serious work. Some type of mobile friendly
format and some type of lightbox for your images.

I promote and curate indie game projects and couldn't get past the front page
of your site.

~~~
khedoros1
I was just thinking that it had a nice, kind classic feel. I guess I can see
why it might be annoying on mobile, though.

~~~
Kiro
It's a complete disaster. If this is what HN brutalists, who normally
complains about animations and modern UI, think is a good site I rest my case.

~~~
Sylos
No one said that it's going to win a prize, but it's not like it's
particularly terrible either.

Also, it's the webpage of a game. You go to the webpage, you download it, and
then you're probably not gonna see the webpage again for a few months.

It's also free. If you can't get past some flaws in the webpage to grab your
free copy, frankly just bugger off.

