Tag Archives: Space

Storyline: Colony Reports, the first two days

11.18.2012, 08:17 PHX
The landing was successful, with only a few areas of damage. I have confirmed the return vehicle is operational, however significant fuel leaks will require repair, and re-composition of fuel reserves are necessary. The generation of fuel will require finding a significant source of water, which is underway.
It was a beautiful morning, but [...]

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Abstraction, Abstraction, Abstraction…

Have you tried out SPORE?
In the search for space colony simulators and games that are just plain fun, SPORE, recently released by EA for PC and Mac is a great diversion. So is this a game review? or commentary on simulation? Probably a little of both… A good sim abstracts difficult elements to make them approachable [...]

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All is well, time for a break…

I just completed a drive from Austin, Texas to North Central Kansas and back, in three days, alone. Funeral trip, but not the point of this post… at best, I averaged 60 mph and the trip, just under 800 miles took about 14 hours each way. Never mind that I drove straight through - it [...]

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Status Report and Countdown to release…

Hi friends,
We have been a bit bogged down in details, trying to sew up a demonstration version of Colony ETS. Without giving away the surprise, mission control has changed our target landing site just a little bit… and the results should be fairly exciting. Look for an update in the next few weeks, and a [...]

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Screenshots of planetary environments!

I added a picasa widget that will feed a random image on the right panel. If you want to see more, either refresh your browser, or click directly onto the image, hyperlinking you to a higher resolution view in the Picasa service. Feel free to comment!

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Other Colony (like) games…

I must say I haven’t been very impressed with the quality of the other space colony / settlement sims out there. They tend toward the cartoonish or focus on a particular element and that becomes all of the content quickly. As for the graphics - it drifts from pretty raw to downright rough, understandable in [...]

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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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Storyline: The Ride

Brutus arrived in orbit, queueing a release of a slow spinning satellite that would remain asynchronous with the landing site. With a silent dance, small rockets oriented the satellite, as solar arrays and antennae opened and closed, testing the systems. In a few minutes, Brutus would receive the first string of communication exchanges, high resolution photography and [...]

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Storyline: Outbound

Gerome slid exhausted into his bunk. Since arriving at the Delta Space Offloading Station, Gerome had spent seemingly limitless hours reviewing procedures and policies of claiming the homestead. He was still adjusting to the slightly less gravity of the space station. Tomorrow would be another big day, introduction to his new home, that just rolled [...]

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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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