Space Sim Framework [RELEASED]

Greetings! The Space Sim Framework is finally ready for release, after 1.5 years of development. It is an all-encompassing, full feature arcade space sandbox shooter framework. It provides a base for building any type of a space shooter, with focuses on different areas such as tactical play, trading, exploration, combat and other.
Update June 1st 2020: The Phase Two asset version contains much more features including the RTS view, nebulae and procedurally generated sectors, bringing to you the result of almost 3 years of development!

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Please take a look at the playlist which documents the development process of a game from which this playlist was derived.

DEVELOPMENT BLOGS

Features:
- Physics based flight model
- Saving and loading using binary files
- Sector editor and sector saving using binary files
- Faction system with faction relations
- Multiple ship ownership
- AI with an intricate command system
- Multiple types of weapons, including beam, projectile and missile weapons
- AI controlled turrets with target prediction
- User interface with a 3D heads up display
- Ship cockpit support (interior view)
- Ingame menu system with window menus
- Fully keyboard or/and mouse controllable interface and controls
- Full feature space stations with animated docks and cargo/ship/equipment dealers
- Distinction between small craft (fighters) and capital ships (transports and warships)
- Sector and universe maps accessible and interactable through menus
- Ship equipment such as energy boosters, additional armor and other
- Jumpgates and a full-featured player persistence (autosave and autoload)
- Player progression: experience, levels, kill counting, dynamic faction reputation
- Asteroid fields and dynamic sectors easily expandable with other features
- Modular design allows for decoupling of components and easy addition of new ones
- Maintainable and scalable codebase
- Procedurally generated sectors and visual effects
- Interactive RTS-style map view
- Cloud nebulae

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This looks amazing. Well done

 

Thank you so much
The asset is pending approval!

 

Good luck, it does look great framework 100 %

 

Is there a playable demo?

 

Greetings, I don't have one yet but I can build it for you and upload to Drive
EDIT: Here's the build, zipped 54 MB: https://drive.google.com/open?id=12s2XUnRnZEtwrhdWtVRuz5I30_Fwkg1H

 

Will this ever have something like landing on planets and exploring a bit like No Man's Sky?

 

Sure it will! You just have to implement it

On a more serious note, that would be a bit too much for me to try to do alone. It's certainly possible, but not for me alone -I'll leave this to a studio or someone with more time on their hands.
Planetary landing is a hefty feature and exploration is a bit easier, depending on what you wish to accomplish. It would be challenging to do in Unity to say the least.

 

Luckly there is a solution for planet landing and rendering other planetary bodies right here.
You just have to change your flight code to accept a gravitational change when near planet magnetic field.

 

Lovely, that wouldnt be very complicated as my framework uses Unity rigidbodies without any special magic. But implementing it within individual sectors would be another difficult task.

 

Thats what i needed all the time !
I had a little bit of strugle to get my first own sector into the game because sometimes im to stupid to read .
Works great!
Will there be Updates?

 

Any planned updates for this? Interested but 1.5 months since last developer response.

 

There will be updates if necessary for bugs or if there are any interesting feature requests. Please voice your opinions here, I do monitor this thread. For any bug reports please contact me on sincress@gmail.com as i will reply more quickly

 

Awesome, thank you! Just wanted to make sure it was supported before I gave it a shot. Honestly looks like a framework for an X3 game, out of curiosity is it inspired by the X series? Very cool.

 

Yes! It's certainly supported and it was my main focus for the last 18 months. It was inspired both by X3 (and X2 The Threat) as well as by Freelancer, my two favourite space games. The main idea was mashing all of my favourite features of the two (minus the multiplayer, which would be too much for me alone) so here we are

 

Hey @sincress , i wanted to change the distance from were i can click on a Ship, station or asteroid to set it as target while flying but didnt find were to change the code. Can you help me out with this?
Thanks

 

Take a look at the ShipPlayerInput.cs script and on line 150 you will find the CheckTargetSelection method. There you can modify the raycast distance. You also might want to make it a public variable and possibly change it in some situations.

 

Great, thank you. That was one of the scripts i didnt checked yet.

 

What does the sector editor look like?

Also consider providing a link to the asset store.

 

The sector editor is an editor window which enables you to save or load a sector from/into the SectorEditor scene. You can basically arrange the sector as you wish it to look like and then just save it. Also there's a randomize option which populates the sector with random entities.

 

How large can a sector be? Does this handle Origin physics issues, or rather...does it have a Floating Origin System to prevent space jittering when going too far from the world origin?

thanks!

 

To be honest, I haven't really given this too much thought. The biggest sector I made was only around 10 000 units so I guess you'd have to add floating origin system if you need really massive sectors.

 

I would absolutely love to see a standalone VR-integrated version of this package.

 

I have a few questions that might require some longer answers...

1) How difficult/seamless would it be to convert all of the menus into interactable world space UI's?

2) I want all aspects of this to be supported by controller (i.e. manual movement of the navigation and menu cursors) is this currently supported?

3) Are ship upgrade modules and grades of modules currently supported?

As mentioned I am looking to convert this to a VR project for Quest and any advice in doing so would be appreciated!!

 

Just purchased the system and I love it. I'm running into a few big issues that I am not understanding. Pardon me, I am not a skilled programmer. I would really appreciate the help:

1) The Jobs/Missions button freezes my unity and never recovers. This feature is unavailable to me for this reason and I really would love to use it. No errors to trace, unity just locks up and is unresponsive. I am on Macbook Pro, i3 8500, iris graphics. Latest final build of Unity.

2) I have toggled the mesh renderers off of the default station model (bigstation) in order to replace it with my own mesh. However when i size or move the Mooring waypoints or docking waypoints, the ship will only pace around the waypoints in Auto-dock, and never finds the waypoints. What is the correct workflow for creating/modifying stations in this?

 

Hello,

I'm glad to hear you enjoy the asset. Regarding your questions:

1) If Unity freezes, there could be a few things that went wrong such as an infinite loop somewhere in code, or a stack overflow. Without your specific usecase I can't reproduce the issue, but you can try debugging that piece of code which seems to cause the issue - either in the mission menu or in one of the mission classes.

2) Size of the mooring waypoints doesn't matter. The docking autopilot looks for a sequence of waypoints which ensures the ship enters the mooring collider properly - check out the station docking script and you will see a list of waypoints referenced.

I hope this helps you!

 

Hi Sincress-
Thank you so much for your time. How can I fix the sell window not exitting after I sell something? Right now I am able to break it and gain infinite money.

 

When opening a new dialog window, close all existing ones
Just remove the subMenus

 

I'm a pure beginner so this is a learning project for me. I am unable to fix scripts errors for the most part.

It would be very appreciated if for the next release there were several fixes for the UI portion of this. Out of the box the UI system is great but has a few bugs.

• The submenus should close when needed. The store window will not close after unmounting a weapon, selling it and mounting a new weapon.

• I wish that globally ESC would always close all UI or if docked return to dock menu. A video tutorial on the sector system would be appreciated.

• A video tutorial on managing how and when and how many missions are spawned and where to configure that would be appreciated - Right now for me I am struggling to understand how factions control that.

• Jumpgates for new scenes (retaining player/ship data on scene load) would be a welcome option.

• During in-engine runtime, the jobs window completely freezes the game only if there is a job available. This does not happen in a build.

 

Hi, Sorry for the late reply. I'm having a look at the issues you've pointed out. Please contact me via email and we can continue the discussion there!

Thanks!

 

These are some SERIOUSLY bad controls for you UI and menu in the 'demo' you posted. I've never seen anything so bad. The menus are impossible to navigate. When I launch it, the screen only says "Sincress." What's that supposed to mean? How am I to know its a button? The weapon system is convoluted and not intuitive. Move by keyboard, but it says throttle is controlled only by mouse? Can't figure out how to just simply shoot something. The Unity launcher shows "fire 1" is left mouse, but that does nothing. It says "jump" is "space", but jump changes the control scheme? The Unity input is all ignored? Joystick twist not supported. Just.. everything.. is SOOO.. aweful!!

Take a weekend to play some space sims and see how it should be, man. This is embarrassing.

 

Hi,
I don't think there is any reason to getting rude.
Maybe you did something wrong with the installation of the asset?
Maybe there is a little step missing in your setup?

 

Hi mate. The demo I released is only meant to showcase the features of the framework. This is not a full game and as such does not have an elaborately designed UI with ergonomics in mind. It's unfortunate you didn't like the demo, but as an engineer I've been focused primarily on making the codebase easy to work with.

The Framework is supposed to be a starter project for a developer (or a studio) for their game development process or a playground for inspired developers and artists who would enjoy making their visions a reality in a limited amount of time.

Regardless, thank you for your input - I will do my best to improve the ergonomics and add an in-game tutorial into the next version.

 

Input is not working when playing the demo scene. w moves the ship up instead of moving the ship forward, and s moves the ship down instead of breaking. Only A,D works. G & E is not working either. Mouse clicking's not working. Shooting not working. I'm using Unity 2019.2. I checked the input settings and they're all correct. can you please help?

 

Hi, if you're referring to the demo build I've put up, I'll check out the problems you've listed and try to improve the demo with some of the suggestions accumulated from people posting above. As for the movement, in keyboard flight mode, W and S control the pitch while A and D control the yaw, while in mouse mode (space to toggle) A and D are for strafing and mouse controls the ships yaw and pitch. The idea was to make the game entirely playable with only mouse or only keyboard.

 

Hi Sincress, many thanks for your quick response. sorry it was me who didn't know how to use it. Now I get it. WOW, I love your creation. Thank you for releasing it. Thank you for sharing your talent with the world. I hope you will keep updating it for us.

 

No problems! I'm honored you enjoy my project. I'm working on an ingame tutorial, some adjustments to the profile creation menu (the Create New button is missing somehow) and I'll be setting the ship input up so that it uses Unity's Input instead of hardcoded buttons. The update should be live sometime next week!

 

Thanks a million!
I've been searching for a very long time for a good start for my space game. After wasting so much money on purchasing and testing so many assets, I think I've finally found one. Look forward to the new updates.

 

Hi Sincress,
I'd like to report that the demo scene crashed randomly with the following error:
ArgumentOutOfRangeException: Index was out of range. Must be non-negative and less than the size of the collection.
Parameter name: index
System.ThrowHelper.ThrowArgumentOutOfRangeException (System.ExceptionArgument argument, System.ExceptionResource resource) (at <599589bf4ce248909b8a14cbe4a2034e>:0)
System.ThrowHelper.ThrowArgumentOutOfRangeException () (at <599589bf4ce248909b8a14cbe4a2034e>:0)
System.Collections.Generic.List`1[T].get_Item (System.Int32 index) (at <599589bf4ce248909b8a14cbe4a2034e>:0)
MenuController.Update () (at Assets/SpaceSimFramework/Code/UI/GenericMenus/MenuController.cs:90)
ScrollMenuController.Update () (at Assets/SpaceSimFramework/Code/UI/GenericMenus/ScrollMenuController.cs:23)

I can't provide the exact steps to reproduce it since it happens randomly. I just remember what I did once:
1. Started the Main menu scene and jumped through the jump gate
2. Opened the Menu and opened the sector map. Unity editor crashed.

My Unity version is 2019.2.4f1.

updated: I tried a few times. It crashed when browsing the sector map.

 

Thanks for the heads up, I'll make sure to find and update this as soon as possible. You may want to contact me via mail so that I can let you know why it crashes immediately, so you won't have to wait for the patch to go live.

 

Space Sim Framework
vs
Space RTS & Arcade Kit

It appears one is newer, has more recent features, but they are both the same price? Having not recognized your store name I foolishly, without looking further into it purchased the arcade kit, while the space sim seems to be much more geared to what I'm needing, advertising the separate assets like AI and trading posts, menu framework flight mechanics AI sector editing etc.. Anyway hoping as the author if you could help me understand why the arcade kit is the same price if it's not including these?

Also- If you would consider uploading the trading system as an add-on for the other pack, like the vehicle editor?

Thanks for your time, still the best buy in quite a long time, congrats on your release, a lot of hard work

 

Hi, first of all, thought my browser was zoomed in due to the huge text

Now, the assets are different and although the Space RTS & Arcade Kit is newer, both assets are updated regularly and share the same quality. The Space Sim Framework is geared towards a sandbox space sim game, while the RTS & Arcade kit is geared more towards an RTS/shooter combination. The price is similar because while the former has features such as trading and docking, the latter has a very complex camera and view management system, as well as an intuitive AI Command interface.

The different projects are meant as different starting points for various developers and are suited to a wide range of needs
Both "large" projects (Space Sim Framework and Space RTS & Arcade Kit) contain other smaller assets: AI ships, flight mechanics, weapon systems and etc. The ingame ship editor is the only one not integrated into these two. The trade AI command is specialised to the Space Sim Framework as it contains the commodity pricing logic.

Thanks a lot for your kind words, your support means a lot to me!

Best regards,
Sincress

 

@sincress
I noticed that you've added a tutorial feature to the demo scene. However, i"d like to have the old demo scene back.
The tutorial feature added to the demo really confuses me. sorry. I'd be enough if you just add some control maps to a readme file. The old demo scene has a clean setup I'd like to use.

 

If you've downloaded the previous version, it should still be available for you in the asset store folder on your drive for re-import.. I don't think adding a tutorial system is a bad thing, maybe not polished? But it just seems like natural progression for a package like this which has a campaign as a high feature point, specifically with single-player the two just go hand in hand.

 

Hi, thank you both for the comments. Some people had requested the tutorial (the controls are, admittedly, quite complicated) which is why I've made an extra effort to include a detailed tutorial which serves several purposes:
First, it teaches a developer/player how to use the asset and control the ship
Second, it shows off the features of the asset
Third, it demonstrates how a singleplayer campaign mission can be scripted into the game

If you wish to have the old scene back, I can probably make a version with both included.

Best regards,
Sincress

 

That would be awesome

 

is there a updated demo? the february 2019 demo does not play as well as expected.

 

The updated demo of Space Sim Framework is now available! I am working on a new version which will include the old demo scene, a debug console output ingame (for debugging builds) and some other minor improvements!

 

Version 1.1 has been released!
New features:
- collision damage
- ingame debug console
- automatic turret registration with owner ship
- glowing pickups

Bugs fixed:
- switching to other playership when current is destroyed
- disappearing cursor
- saving problem when jumping to other sectors

Much more is coming soon, as I'm working on integrating features from the Space RTS & Arcade Kit into the Space Sim Framework!

 

Many thanks for listening to the community