Nick's Corner

Just a quick update to reassure you all that work is still progressing. Unfortunately I'm working on a lot of things at once right now which means very little in the way of screenshotable material has come out in the last week or two. I'm also working on a massive deadline for my PhD, so I've had less free time than usual.

What have I been...

With Pigment, I hope to (for the computers that can handle it) offer an entire galaxy to explore. Most of the area will go unexplored, as the vast distance between stars alone is enough to make the heart jump, but I want the far away stars and black holes to still have their effect felt in across the galaxy.

This brings a problem of precision.

According...

Ok, so it's not the octree-based gravitation I promised you, but I came up with a very last-minute massive overhaul idea for aesthetics which has slightly broken the octree code. No biggie, but it's gonna take a bit longer to fix. On the plus side I am very excited indeed for the new look of the thing, which I'll show you at a later date. So...

Surprisingly it actually kept running interactively without stuttering for about five minutes before crashing. According to google our galaxy contains about 300,000,000,000 stars which is only 30,000 times more than what I've got! Not bad, if I do say so myself. Of course, really this is a limit on objects in general, as my universe won't just...

This is a quick video I made of the spheres moving about and gravitating with each other.

I think in my next journal article (not tonight I'm afraid, I'm bogged down with tons of real-life work) I'll go into how I'm calculating them all. For the impatient I'm essentially using...

I figured Hello World was a bit of a cliche these days, and since I'm working on a procedural space game, I figured Hello Universe would work better.

So I'll start by introducing you to my game. I call it Pigment.

Pigment is a game in which you fly among the stars, mining asteroids, trading, building factories, upgrading your ships and meeting...