ΨευδΩρίγενης

When I first thought about coding again, it wasn't long before I started thinking about making a game. I'm a gamer, after all, and there's that whole thing about writing what you know.

Before long, the idea came to me: what about Silent Hunter in space? After all, everything's better when it's in space.

I decided to start smaller, though, which was definitely a good idea given my inexperience. Doubly so, once I discovered that someone beat me to it.

Objects in Space is basically Silent Hunter with a little dash of FTL. And it's the most fun I've had in a game in quite awhole.

How It Works

OiS is at its core your standard Freelancer-esque trading sim. But while games of this type often focus mostly on economics and dogfighting, OiS emphasizes ship management to a much greater degree. Meanwhile, the actual flying of your ship is handled nearly identically to a submarine sim.

Basic, in-system navigation is done on a 2D plotter. You can set where you want to go and let the ship fly you (and you can plot a series of waypoints to go around obstacles and the like).

You also have the option of flying manually. But you're subject to realistic physics, such as inertia, so you have to be careful: turning in a different direction and executing a burn won't magically negate the momentum you had developed before.

Meanwhile, power management is key. Burning your main engines or using your RCS (which is how you rotate) is power-hungry. If you go over what your reactor can produce, you start to drain your back-up batteries. If those run out, you're unable to do anything until they recharge enough, so you can get yourself into trouble by manuvering too much. And it's not just engines: things like a jump drive (which allows you to go to other systems) and defenses also take power, so you have to manage carefully, particularly in combat.

The FTL comparison starts to come in with repairs. You have various components in your ship, from engines and reactor(s) to navigation, defensive measures, weapons, scanners, communications, etc. These all have various little doodads inside them, and those components will start stop working if your ship takes damage (whether from weaponry or flying too close to a star). You have to buy these pieces individually, so if something breaks and you don't have a replacement, you're screwed until you can get to a station that has the right part.

Meanwhile, there are too many for you to realistically keep a store of everything. Repairs then are a serious concern, and it makes flying in the vastness of space more perilous than simply driving your car down the block.

Combat is still fairly rudimentary from the limited bits I've seen. But where the game really shines is in how you avoid it, and this is where the submarine comparisons really come in.

Here we have the main “cockpit” view of one of the ships in game. Clicking on any of the monitors will bring it full-screen, and allow interaction with it. But you may notice the red lighting everywhere, and the fact that communications are “non-functional.” This is because the ship is in EmCon mode, short for “emissions control.”

Every component on a ship has an emissions profile. Certain things are “noisier” than others; for example, the main engine gives out a lot more emissions than your navigational computer. This directly affects how easily you're detected by other ships in the system, some of which aren't necessarily friendly. If you notice the screen in the top-left, this is the scanner. If something isn't trying to be stealthy and is within range, it'll be identified pretty quickly. For something that isn't, though, you can sometimes get blips at certain frequencies that correspond to different ship's systems. Some of these will be sensor ghosts, some won't, and one of the mechanics is figuring out what you're looking at. (The game explains in more detail how this works, so thankfully it's not a guessing game as much as it sounds.)

Meanwhile, going into EmCon mode shuts down the noisier components of your ship (and you can pick which these are). But this often means your reactor, and so you're left with whatever's in your batteries. This can last quite awhile if you're standing still, but manuvering and any defesnive measures can burn through it rapidly. Those green boxes represent the emissions level of your ship, basically meaning 2/5. Things like an IFF also increase this; but in more heavily populated/patrolled systems, you can be fined for having it off.

There's also a “terrain” element that comes into play. In the first screenshot above, you can see the blueish nebulae. These significantly reduce your visibility, and so it's worth sticking to them as much as possible if you're someplace that isn't patrolled very well (or someplace that is, if you're going the smuggling or piracy route).

And this is where the game really shines for me. I got a mission that required me to get a person out of the system we were in, and you're told by the NPC that you'll be pursuied immediately. Sure enough, there are several ships on screen that are identifiable as the type that would be after me. I'm completely outgunned (my ship isn't armed at all at this point), so I have to get to the jump gate by making my way through nebuale and timing my movements to avoid them. Burns and turns are extremely noisy, and so you have to be careful to only do them within a nebula and then make a break for it. It was a relatively short time before I was able to make my way out, but it required a close eye, both on the other ships any my battery reserves, and it was immensely satisfying to watch one of those ships fly past me without noticing I was there.

Does it Work?

The game is still in beta, and there are places where it's a little rough around the edges. Occasional graphical glitches on screens happen, and I've had a couple crashes in my week or so of playing. Nothing major, though, and the auto-saves are frequent enough I've never lost any meaningful amount of progress.

Meanwhile, the writing is fantastic, and it does a better job than most of making tutorials feel like part of the world. There's a news feed that feels far more real than most, and the devs say they're planning on making those events have a direct effect on economics. Patches seem regular from what I can tell, and there're a lot of intriguing features they're planning, including a Linux version (currently it's just Windows and Mac).

But still, it's only worth buying a game in early access if it's worth the money now, not later. And Objects in Space definitely is. It's already got great mechanics and one of the most fleshed-out universes of any space sim I've played. It's well-written, and allows for a variety of approaches, from piracy to honest trader and everything in between. I look forward to seeing where they go with it in the future, but even now i'm enjoying it a great deal.

#games #thingsilike