About UNION Spaceship CommandUNION Spaceship Command is a cooperative spaceship simulator in which two or more players work together to command a spaceship. Each player on the ship takes on one or more roles (currently Captain, Helm, Tactical and Science/Coms). It is inspired by the concept of Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator, but this is a very different game. UNION is very much focused on simulation, having systems which are deep but which are also accessible (the goal is easy to pick up, difficult to master). The entire game is simulated, from the physics used for (3D) space flight to power, heat and sensors.
I'll be covering the features of UNION in more detail over the coming weeks.
Clicking an image below will open a full size version.
About DevelopmentI have been working on UNION on and off in my spare time over the past three years. It has undergone a few restarts in that time, as I learnt more about the networking and architecture requirements of a game of this type. My belief in the game has not diminished though, and I believe that I have enough momentum now, and am far enough along, to see the game through.
A big breakthrough for me in UNION was re-building the game using a data focused entity component system, it has made so many things fall into place rather easily.
I have all of the networking framework done with large scale entity/object replication, dynamic movement (with prediction and interpolation) based on physics, flight, prototyped power and heat simulation, shields, a working prototype of the engineering UI, and a work in progress prototype of the tactical UI.
Performance and stability, both in terms of general/rendering performance and networking (particularly over the internet) are hugely important to me. The game performs really well over the internet and it is very stable.
I will be doing a video dev log soon, but here is a short video clip of a multiplayer flight test I did yesterday, showing multiplayer flight with physics (every object on the map, including asteroids, are dynamic with mass):