I took the theme and reversed it: Space Limited, or Space LTD. You run a generic space company that does company stuff up in the cold void of space. (trading, hauling, mining etc)

I'm doing the slow 3-week extra mode and making the game with the original xbox. After a week about all I have working is ship piloting and moving about the solar system and a basic piloting UI.

Though the solar system is randomly generated, I tried to keep to typical sizes and distances. The cubic volume of my star systems are INT_MAX sectors at 64k meters across, so about 940 AU or about 1.5% of a lightyear. This is about 5x what you need to cover most systems (our heliopause is about 120 AU out).

The tricky bit is scale. Ships and people need around meter scale, but planets and other big objects are way too huge. I decided on a 1 unit == 1 megameter for big stuff. Our sun is about a 700 radius at that scale, and ceres around 1, mercury 2.4, Jupiter 70.

I could never think of a situation where a ship would be behind something huge as that would make it too far to see, so I just render the big stuff in the megameter scale, then clear the depth buffer and render the meter scale stuff.

Here's the UI and a really crappy shuttle I made in blender in 5 minutes

Here's a gas giant:

I used stable diffusion to generate 20 or so gas giant textures, and will probably do the same for the other planet types. I'll probably do rockies, metals, panthalassic etc

Screenshots look a bit squished because I haven't got around to fixing the resolution / aspect stuff. I think it is drawing 640x480.

Game has a long way to go! Right now it is a bit like a space version of desert bus. Even when I cheat my engine up so I can accelerate at 30g it still takes a long time to get anywhere. Space is big!

Also I added in a tiny drag for the solar wind. At 50 kilometers per second speed there's 0.1 G of drag.

I'm not doing any orbital mechanics, so planets and stations and the like will have a fixed location. This lets me do a sun-relative position and speed. That makes waypoints so much easier.

I threw 20 cubemapped gas giants in a single scene and the old xbox handled it like a champ. 800 fps with all that and no vsync!