Note: this game is still pre-alpha. Expect a terrible experience.
[ Development progress may be tracked via the project page ]
Cosmosis is an early work in progress for an open world space game, potentially with planetary combat and procedural environments. The current priority is to create a PvP space battle game with arenas next to beautifully rendered procedural planets.
Demo:
Click here to see a showcase of what the engine is currently capable of producing.
The game is rapidly changing, and constantly brings graphical improvements and new features.
Note to anyone who wants to test Cosmosis via git cloning - the game is currently undergoing a mass refactor. For a smoother experience, considering cloning or downloading tag v0.73.0-beta.3.
Cosmosis plans to eventually be a high quality open world space exploration game. It has the Milky Way galaxy as its home and currently uses real NASA data for nearby stars (constellations are visible from Earth). A procedural generation system is currently being designed to be used where NASA data does not exist. In this regard it aims to be hyperrealistic.
Space flight will be very flight-sim-like (i.e. player has manual control over every aspect of the ship). Ship internals will be modular. It currently has functional warp drives, though travel is currently limited while functionality is smoothed out. A physics system is being implemented.
Planets and their (hostile Lovecraftian) inhabitants will be procedurally generated. Ground-based combat will probably be souls-like, but that decision has not been set in stone.
The source is made available to all users for backup and modding purposes, but this project is not free (see Why we provide source code below).
This game is currently still in pre-alpha, meaning you won't have much to do. The little you can you is difficult to find because the interfaces that make some functions obvious (or even visible) do not yet exist. It also has bugs, and already working features will break while the project rapidly changes.
Important note: this game allows complex menu interactions by allowing mouse
pointer locking / unlocking. If you get stuck wanting to look around but
instead you have only a mouse cursor, press Left Ctrl and you'll switch to
mouse-look mode. If you rebind core controls and accidentally break the game,
go to %AppData% (Windows) or ~/.local/share/ (Linux) and delete the
directory named CosmosisGame, then restart the game.
The latest beta can currently do the following:
- Fly around at many thousand times the speed of light in a to-scale large (albeit mostly empty) universe that's millions of light-years across. This mode is launched by default, and uses a spaceship with a warp drive and nothing else. Note that it currently generates a static skybox based on real star data when the game boots; to actually fly amongst nearby stars, see the next point.
- Fly around real Earth-visible stars
as a ghost. You can activate this mode by pressing Backspace and going to
debug tools->Star free-flight. Use+and-to change flight speed. - You can fly around your spaceship by pressing
F8. If the spaceship has switches or other intractables, you can interact with them by pressingE.
Windows may force the application to use integrated graphics, which will massively decrease performance. The game does not yet allow changing graphics cards, though an issue is currently open to add this feature.
For now, you may force Windows to use discrete graphics by setting power saving mode to high performance. If your driver configuration does not provide the option (or you don't like that idea), you can manually force it as follows:
- Open your Windows start menu.
- Within the start menu, go to Settings, then click System.
- Click Display, Scroll down to Graphics Settings.
- Select "Classic app", then click "Browse".
- Navigate to
Cosmosis.exeand select it. - Once it's been added to the list click "Options" then select "High Performance".
Cosmosis was brought into existence for the following reasons:
- Many current 'good' space sims out there are either many (MANY) years in development with no end in sight, or the devs have lost touch with their audiences and make their games worse with updates each year. Even worse, you can't simply downgrade to a version you like and play offline.
- None of the space games I'm personally interested in have good (if any) modding support.
- Souls clones developers try add a little something extra to make their games unique. This project will to stay true to the original formulas as much as possible. Exceptions to the rule will be for additional classes, not traditional ones.
You can make a fully interactable spaceship yourself with zero programming experience. All you need is a copy of Blender 3.3. We have a Blender add-on to make this easier, though you can easily manage this without the add-on by following our guide on Cosmosis mesh codes.
If you're a coder, coded modding support is in active development; documentation and examples will be released soon.
Note on Blender support: we no longer support Blender 2.93 due to breaking changes in Blender 3.x GLTF export processes.
There are two niches out there that get poor development: space sims, and souls clones. The developers of space sims seem incredibly out of touch with what their fans want (or just incredibly greedy, who knows ¯_(ツ)_/¯), and souls clones do things in ways that completely miss the point of the original Souls Master's vision (in this author's subjective opinion, of course).
This project will probably make the exact same mistakes. The difference here is that Cosmosis is not a locked behind closed source corporate red tape. You don't like what's been done, mod it out. Tweak it. Change it. Make it yours and release your changes as a better fork, perhaps propose those changes make their way back here. The point here is that control is in your hands, not some developer who's stopped caring about you and the promises they made during their Kickstarter.
Explore a universe gone insane and unlock its deeper truths... or simply don't bother and drown your sorrows at Bernie's Bar and Brothel while looking for new bounty missions to fuel your drug addiction.
Cosmosis is an early concept for an open world space game, potentially with planetary combat and procedural environments. The current priority is to create a PvP space battle game with arenas next to beautifully rendered procedural planets.
It hopes to one day emulate the Milky Way with acceptable precision. The real issue here is not a technical one, but rather task priority (make it an actually fun game before making it a galaxy sim). The engine already supports flying thousands of light years to distant celestial bodies in an instant with no loading screens.