Author Archives: Howard Dortch

Planning a Mars colony mission

So, you have decided to travel to another world and create a sustainable colony or at least discover if it is possible. It is kind of like moving to some remote location in the middle of the frozen tundra in Siberia. You can’t carry all you might need in one trip so how do you [...]

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Simulation design is much like the real thing

Designing the game or simulator is much like making the trip for real. That is a rather bold statement and I don’t want to ever trivialize the efforts of the brave men and women that venture into space for mankind nor the endless hours of work by top engineers to make this happen, but the [...]

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Mining simulation

How do you simulate the mineral distribution on a alien world for simulation purposes? Big question and many answers can be given to this challenge. How detailed will the simulation or game be? That is the better question to start with. In a simple game we can just randomly drop things where ever we want [...]

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Organic elements in a simulation

Being on an alien world presents a few challenges in reality that need to be addressed in simulation. Food is one of the main issues. In a pure game environment we can provide the user with virtual food and move on to more interesting things. One of the issues I wanted to address was how [...]

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Developing a Persistent Space Colony “Sim” in 3D

Developing a comprehensive “simulation” of space colonization presents many challenges, not the least are the traditional “scientific” and “physical” issues and modeling of the simulation. The struggle is with translating the depth and complexity into a simple simulation - with adequate analogs to “real” tasks and with designing the interface to represent those tasks, success [...]

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