https://steamcommunity.com/app/681330
Really nice looking and right up our street in terms of hard sci-fi aspect
Helium Rain
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FluffyFreak
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Re: Helium Rain
So a single player space game in C++, by 4 (french?) devs, 3 year in development, 6 months to go; using Unreal Engine.
Source: https://github.com/arbonagw/HeliumRain
Source: https://github.com/arbonagw/HeliumRain
Re: Helium Rain
That's a nice game!
To me, who actually likes to fly around it's a little bit too constrained with that travel system. And it feels quite tiny.
The HUD is quite limited also, but otherwise the ui is great in my opinion.
I kinda dig the minimalistic art style.
And it can be quite enjoyable anyhow.
To me, who actually likes to fly around it's a little bit too constrained with that travel system. And it feels quite tiny.
The HUD is quite limited also, but otherwise the ui is great in my opinion.
I kinda dig the minimalistic art style.
And it can be quite enjoyable anyhow.
Re: Helium Rain
I like this game a lot - I've not played it in a while, but that's also a good thing as it's a massive time sink.
...One thing I do want to comment on is some of the design that went into the game. Namely, orbital mechanics, or what is supposed to be an approximation for them. I want and need to learn more about orbital mechanics, and I actually think Pioneer is the perfect tool for this when it comes to general principles - you have enough delta-v (thousands of km/hr!) in Pioneer that you can screw up and do rather extreme maneuvers, see what it takes to do them, and then scale the principles back to contemporary spacecraft which would only have a few hundred of m/s delta-v (at most!). That said, back to Helium Rain...
Helium Rain is a room-based game / sim. There are some sim-like aspects to the game, but after a while, the space flight part really is more game than sim. I imagine the idea of having something "room based" in a space sim is to approximate the following:
1. Consider the concept that some point in space becomes a reference point which represents a stable orbit.
2. Deviation from this point by too extreme a measure means that the present orbit cannot be maintained.
Helium Rain does generally adhere to those ideas regardless of the authors of said game's actual intentions. They kind of make sense, and they kind of don't. Back to Pioneer:
When learning some manual space flight, try to fly up to an orbiting station by hand. Getting there is a fun exercise all by itself. Once you're in the vicinity of the station, however, try cranking up the thrust and manually zipping around like you're in a dogfight with something... You will quickly notice that you're no longer really in orbit with the station. Instead, you are now in a rather different orbit, and rejoining the station can take a lot of energy. Now back to Helium Rain:
Helium Rain permits fun "Newtonian" dogfights and battles to take place. Calling them "Full Newtonian" is a lie - gravity is not really a factor, and in actual orbital flight it is absolutely a factor. Because fuel is not a concern, ships can reach ridiculous speeds, but are somewhat constrained by the small "rooms." How the sizes of these rooms were determined hopefully has some degree of reasonable scientific-algorithming involved, but that information seems to be left to speculation rather than explanation.
So, to conclude (for now), I still really like this game, but I also found it very enlightening to try Pioneer in contrast. In the latter, I could use basic, general principles of orbital mechanics (diagram stuff rather than math salads) to see if the workings of Helium Rain actually made sense. In that regard, they kind of didn't, even though you can perceive the logic behind them. The game is by no means ruined for me, but I do think coming to this understanding is important, especially if someone gets into a game like this under the illusion that it's somehow some sort of accurate rendering of how spacecraft could maneuver in orbit. And, the game is all about orbits after all!
...One thing I do want to comment on is some of the design that went into the game. Namely, orbital mechanics, or what is supposed to be an approximation for them. I want and need to learn more about orbital mechanics, and I actually think Pioneer is the perfect tool for this when it comes to general principles - you have enough delta-v (thousands of km/hr!) in Pioneer that you can screw up and do rather extreme maneuvers, see what it takes to do them, and then scale the principles back to contemporary spacecraft which would only have a few hundred of m/s delta-v (at most!). That said, back to Helium Rain...
Helium Rain is a room-based game / sim. There are some sim-like aspects to the game, but after a while, the space flight part really is more game than sim. I imagine the idea of having something "room based" in a space sim is to approximate the following:
1. Consider the concept that some point in space becomes a reference point which represents a stable orbit.
2. Deviation from this point by too extreme a measure means that the present orbit cannot be maintained.
Helium Rain does generally adhere to those ideas regardless of the authors of said game's actual intentions. They kind of make sense, and they kind of don't. Back to Pioneer:
When learning some manual space flight, try to fly up to an orbiting station by hand. Getting there is a fun exercise all by itself. Once you're in the vicinity of the station, however, try cranking up the thrust and manually zipping around like you're in a dogfight with something... You will quickly notice that you're no longer really in orbit with the station. Instead, you are now in a rather different orbit, and rejoining the station can take a lot of energy. Now back to Helium Rain:
Helium Rain permits fun "Newtonian" dogfights and battles to take place. Calling them "Full Newtonian" is a lie - gravity is not really a factor, and in actual orbital flight it is absolutely a factor. Because fuel is not a concern, ships can reach ridiculous speeds, but are somewhat constrained by the small "rooms." How the sizes of these rooms were determined hopefully has some degree of reasonable scientific-algorithming involved, but that information seems to be left to speculation rather than explanation.
So, to conclude (for now), I still really like this game, but I also found it very enlightening to try Pioneer in contrast. In the latter, I could use basic, general principles of orbital mechanics (diagram stuff rather than math salads) to see if the workings of Helium Rain actually made sense. In that regard, they kind of didn't, even though you can perceive the logic behind them. The game is by no means ruined for me, but I do think coming to this understanding is important, especially if someone gets into a game like this under the illusion that it's somehow some sort of accurate rendering of how spacecraft could maneuver in orbit. And, the game is all about orbits after all!