Back to Etherea Development! ETHEREA PROJECT INTRODUCTION AND HISTORY Etherea is my attempt to create a fully procedural and user-modifiable universe, which I first started in 2007. I never had an opportunity to work full time on it, so this became my pet project. Throughout the years it went into different directions and a few restarts (I first wrote it in C++ from scratch, then rewrote in Unity C#, then rewrote in Javascript/WebGL, and then have considered rewriting in Rust but recently decided to simply continue with the Unity version). For many times it went into standby and returned. One thing that always bothers me is that I originally wanted everything be procedural, including ships and characters. I mean, I wanted the entire game to fit into like 128kb. That was my original idea, and the first binary demo that I released had about 56kb only, featuring 8 exploitable planets orbiting their star. With a better exe compressor it would not be so hard to reach something like 32kb for the first binary. I believe that this would be very possible to have the entire game in 128kb. Here is a video from 2011, showing one of its C++ 64kb versions: Anyway, because my time was so short, having only the weekends to spend, I ended up freezing the original C++ version and porting it to Unity, as a plugin. It worked relatively well, but I also hit some of the engine's limitations and being the engine closed-source, that was not as straightforward as I would like. Here is a video from 2012, showing one of its Unity 3D versions: After doing some more progress, I was becoming too tired -- you know, daily work from monday to friday, then working on Etherea saturday and sunday, that was really becoming too much for me, I then froze the project for a few years. Recently, I decided to make a new experiment by writing yet another engine from scratch, this time in Javascript and WebGL. It also went relatively well, but then I quickly reached some performance problems, when I reached the stage of doing some complex physics, Javascript shown its real limitations. Rendering itself was high performance, but collision detection against the planetary terrain was too slow. Here is a video showing the Javascript version: That Javascript version had even some raymarched fractals with interiors. Well, it still had some potential, but I was not entirely satisfied, maybe this could be possible to have enough physics performance, but I was not willing to proceed in that path. I then came back to Unity. Well, Unity has a lot of limitations but it works relatively well and have so many features -- relatively good and stable physics being one of them -- that I believe it was a reasonable decision. But Unity have changed many versions and the old code was pretty much "broken". I had to rewrite a lot, but I did that. This time I added two modes to it: VR and non-VR. At some point I had it running even on an Android S7 edge with GearVR that I had here. So, currently, it does support Google Cardboard, GearVR and Oculus Rift, or non-VR mode if nothing is avaiable. Video showing the new Unity version in Oculus Rift mode: It has an initial space station, quite a few procedural star systems with many planets, and an incomplete game play. Oh well. Now, after these many years, I admit that it became something with no certain path, coming and going into different directions without an end. What I want now is to first define what I really want from it: - Will it be another combat game? - Maybe a virtual reality game without combats? - A mix of the two (some planets having combats, some not)? - An universe editor where people could build things? - A mix of all the above? - None of the above? Well, right now I don't know. Wish I could hear more from what people would like to see. At this moment I believe that a mix of universe editor with a combat game might work well -- where people can create planets themselves and also build things on them, while in some places there is also hostile combat happening. Not sure. For now, I just wanted to put this info here, for no particular reason. I myself like the idea of a virtual reality universe where people build and script things themselves. If that universe becomes a war game, that is to the people themselves. Maybe those who don't like combat will hide into a distant planet and build in peace, until they're found by hostile players. Who knows, that sounds nice to me, maybe that is the final Etherea path. More about this later. Please feel free to give your opinion, I'm hearing. Thanks for reading. https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

ETHEREA PROJECT INTRODUCTION AND HISTORY Etherea is my attempt to create a fully procedural and user-modifiable universe, which I first started in 2007. I never had an opportunity to work full time on it, so this became my pet project. Throughout the years it went into different directions and a few restarts (I first wrote it in C++ from scratch, then rewrote in Unity C#, then rewrote in Javascript/WebGL, and then have considered rewriting in Rust but recently decided to simply continue with the Unity version). For many times it went into standby and returned. One thing that always bothers me is that I originally wanted everything be procedural, including ships and characters. I mean, I wanted the entire game to fit into like 128kb. That was my original idea, and the first binary demo that I released had about 56kb only, featuring 8 exploitable planets orbiting their star. With a better exe compressor it would not be so hard to reach something like 32kb for the first binary. I believe that this would be very possible to have the entire game in 128kb. Here is a video from 2011, showing one of its C++ 64kb versions: Anyway, because my time was so short, having only the weekends to spend, I ended up freezing the original C++ version and porting it to Unity, as a plugin. It worked relatively well, but I also hit some of the engine's limitations and being the engine closed-source, that was not as straightforward as I would like. Here is a video from 2012, showing one of its Unity 3D versions: After doing some more progress, I was becoming too tired -- you know, daily work from monday to friday, then working on Etherea saturday and sunday, that was really becoming too much for me, I then froze the project for a few years. Recently, I decided to make a new experiment by writing yet another engine from scratch, this time in Javascript and WebGL. It also went relatively well, but then I quickly reached some performance problems, when I reached the stage of doing some complex physics, Javascript shown its real limitations. Rendering itself was high performance, but collision detection against the planetary terrain was too slow. Here is a video showing the Javascript version: That Javascript version had even some raymarched fractals with interiors. Well, it still had some potential, but I was not entirely satisfied, maybe this could be possible to have enough physics performance, but I was not willing to proceed in that path. I then came back to Unity. Well, Unity has a lot of limitations but it works relatively well and have so many features -- relatively good and stable physics being one of them -- that I believe it was a reasonable decision. But Unity have changed many versions and the old code was pretty much "broken". I had to rewrite a lot, but I did that. This time I added two modes to it: VR and non-VR. At some point I had it running even on an Android S7 edge with GearVR that I had here. So, currently, it does support Google Cardboard, GearVR and Oculus Rift, or non-VR mode if nothing is avaiable. Video showing the new Unity version in Oculus Rift mode: It has an initial space station, quite a few procedural star systems with many planets, and an incomplete game play. Oh well. Now, after these many years, I admit that it became something with no certain path, coming and going into different directions without an end. What I want now is to first define what I really want from it: - Will it be another combat game? - Maybe a virtual reality game without combats? - A mix of the two (some planets having combats, some not)? - An universe editor where people could build things? - A mix of all the above? - None of the above? Well, right now I don't know. Wish I could hear more from what people would like to see. At this moment I believe that a mix of universe editor with a combat game might work well -- where people can create planets themselves and also build things on them, while in some places there is also hostile combat happening. Not sure. For now, I just wanted to put this info here, for no particular reason. I myself like the idea of a virtual reality universe where people build and script things themselves. If that universe becomes a war game, that is to the people themselves. Maybe those who don't like combat will hide into a distant planet and build in peace, until they're found by hostile players. Who knows, that sounds nice to me, maybe that is the final Etherea path. More about this later. Please feel free to give your opinion, I'm hearing. Thanks for reading.

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