Posts Tagged ‘spaaaaaaaaaaaaace!’

RPS Feature Solar, so good

Premature Evaluation: Universe Sandbox 2

Universe Sandbox 2 has some perfectly reasonable restrictions on what it is willing to simulate, but isn’t always clear about why it’s stopping you from doing something. I wanted to recreate the 0.1 fm wide black hole from Larry Niven’s 1973 story The Hole Man, for instance - and found the scale doesn’t descend that low. It’s not especially surprising that the game doesn’t model subatomic sizes, but getting the diameter below a couple of kilometres is also impossible and attempting to do so has this strange effect of deleting what you just typed and replacing it with the lowest number that the program will accept, and yet nonetheless changing a bunch of other stats that would be affected by a further reduction in diameter.

Each week Marsh Davies orbits the supermassive blackhole that is Early Access and comes back with any stories he can find or gets shredded to subatomic spaghetti as he tumbles towards a point of infinite mass. This week he has become death, destroyer of worlds, and really quite a lot of moons as well, in Universe Sandbox 2. Otherwise known as Universe Sandbox², if you’re the kind of terrible prick who insists on using Character Map to enforce your brand. Anyway, the game’s great.

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You All Have The Bridge: Artemis 1.5

Surprising nobody, the girls are playing Science Officer and Communications Officer. But that's not actually mandatory until someone makes a Galaxy Quest mod.

Artemis Bridge Simulator, everyone’s favourite get-your-friends-round-and-play-Star-Trek-crew game just got a galaxy-sized* update. As well as a general polish, there’s a new mission scripting system lets you create your own heroic adventures from scratch, plus test your collective wits against new space monsters, black holes, and elite ships with teleporters and cloaking devices. You also get a ship editor to put your own stamp on the universe, and even a few neutral ships and friendly destroyers to make the universe a slightly less lonely place.

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