I’ve been working on my realistic space flight simulator, and this is what a full flight currently looks like: from the main menu, into the vehicle builder, launching from the pad, reaching space, and finally coming back down for reentry.

There are already a lot of features in the game, but I still keep finding things I want to add before I’m willing to call it ready.

So I’m curious: what would you personally expect from a realistic space flight simulator? What features would make you want to keep playing?

Mining System

Hello!

Echoes is a space-based MMORPG where you can explore many systems, trade with other players for everything you acquire, and pursue a variety of professions within this new universe.

We've launched the Echoes community to start introducing ourselves to the world!
Echoes - Discord
Echoes - Reddit

Hello! My son is 8 years old, autistic, and very obsessed with space. We used to have a Lenovo Yoga laptop, and he found out about games called Universe Sandbox and Space Engine on YouTube. He watches a channel of a guy named Calvin (I think) and learned how to do a lot of cool things in those games.

That laptop could barely run the games, even at low graphic quality. Would send the fans into overdrive and often it would still lag or crash. He still enjoyed playing them, though.

Unfortunately, mom & I are now separated, and she has the Lenovo laptop, meanwhile I have full custody of the kids. My laptop is a MacBook Air (the 15" M5, latest model).

Looking online, I see that Space Engine doesn't have Mac support at all. And I am uncertain whether Universe Sandbox would run well or not. (And, of course, of those two games, the one he likes more is Space Engine...the one that doesn't work at all.)

I'm curious if there are any other games that would scratch a similar itch and can be played on a Macbook Air? Basically anything totally sandbox-y that just lets you explore space - planets, stars, galaxies, etc. without much of a "goal" - just total exploration.

Thank you!

The game is based on classic space trading sims like Gazillionaire mixed with a bit of Elite. You're not piloting your ship yourself, as everything is mostly presented via animations and narratives so you can focus on managing your planetary business empire.

There are a lot of different roles you can take on. From space trucking, asteroid mining, passenger transport, up to building planet-side factories and buying out other companies through the stock market.

It's designed to be easy to pick up and play, while a full playthrough can still take a good amount of time.

I've added the trailer so you can decide if it's something you might enjoy.

You can give the demo a shot here, I can always use more feedback to make this game the best it can be in its genre! The demo is a good representation of how the full game will play like, release is planned early November right after Steam Next Fest.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4546370/Starport_Merchants/

Here is Perihelion Flight Dynamics Environment's planetarium demo v2.

Someone mentioned the game in another thread and I had no idea it existed but I watched a video on it from a year ago and it looks really cool. A space MMO focused on dogfighting and a mix of Foxhole?!

Just wondering if anyone has pledged and played and if it's worth picking up and trying.

I've been looking for space games where you're more of a commander than a pilot. Less about flying the ship yourself, more about making decisions during a fight. Positioning, crew, power, weapons, damage control, that kind of thing.

What games do this really well?

What was it about the game that actually made you feel like you were commanding a ship?

Hi everyone, Ive recently added new energy shield system into my Space Engineering Survival Sandbox game MineEngineer, it is another step forward towards the ship battle system. I am super excited to share this system with everyone. Please let me know what you think about it.

Has anyone tried this game? Not sure if i should buy it. I can appreciate what it seems to be trying to accomplish. Orbiter is really old and other games in the orbital mechanics niche aren't out yet.

Does anyone have a feel for where the PVP space combat community is in 2026?

I am pretty aware of the game options out there, I have many hours in Star Citizen, Elite: Dangerous, and Star Wars Squadrons, have played Star Conflict in the past, haven't tried In the Black but am aware of it, ditto for Infinity: Battlescape...

I guess I'm looking for a PVP space game sort of like Star Conflict or Squadrons where I can jump in and do some dogfighting. I am not really looking for the RPG aspect present in Elite and SC at the moment. I'm open to arcade flight or more sim/realism focused stuff. Also fine with setting up a HOTAS or just using controller/KBM.

Is there anything out there like this that has a decent player base right now?

Audacia Astra is a simulator. Every star in its 200 light-year bubble comes from the HYG astrometric catalog, every one of them is moving, and every mission you plan has to deal with that.

• Intercept solving — ships meet stars where they will be on arrival, not where they appear tonight. The solver reports positional uncertainty at the destination.
• Real relativity — exact time dilation, ramp/cruise/decel flight profiles at a crew-tolerable g-load, kinetic-energy budgets that will humble you. An optional FTL mode exists and is labeled as the fiction it is.
• Multi-star routes — waypoint chains where each leg departs when the previous one arrives. Route optimization is a moving-target traveling-salesman problem, solved honestly.
• The interstellar medium — local gas clouds erode shielding at relativistic speed; routes are assessed against real region models.
• Pulsar navigation — checkpoint fixes chosen by geometry from millisecond pulsars in the ATNF catalogue.
• Mission dossiers — export any plan as a printable PDF: flight-profile charts, thrust and power figures, intercept geometry, navigation checkpoints.

Available at: https://audaciaastra.com

I've been continuing work on Atlas Gate, a near-future space game where you build and manage a massive modular station in Earth orbit.

This Orbital Log is mostly about starting to connect the station's individual systems into an actual simulation.

Industrial modules can now produce and consume resources, solar arrays generate power while they're illuminated, the station’s relationship with Earth and the Sun is beginning to affect gameplay rather than just being visual.

The video also shows the current station construction and rotation system, along with some of the camera work I've been developing for navigating a large 3D orbital structure.

This is all still pre-alpha, so a lot of the numbers and UI are temporary while I build out the underlying systems.

Orbital Log #002

I'm curious what space sim players think about the direction I'm taking this.

Hey r/spacesimgames!

You have definitely been the most important reddit for me!

Thank you to everyone who wishlisted Void Cargo, played the demo, shared a flight, sent feedback, or reported the strange edge cases.

I hope you find plenty of quiet satisfaction in settling a heavy ship onto the pad - and the particular panic of realizing you started braking much too late.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4319290/Void_Cargo_Equilibrium/

A first-person sci-fi cargo flight sim. Pilot a physics-driven lander, plan risky routes, manage fuel and heavy cargo, and save deliveries by repairing system failures mid-flight. Earn credits and upgrade your ship.

Final Orbit - Dev Update

Hey spacesimgames community, I'm the dev behind Final Orbit - a realistic, orbital mechanics based space flight simulator, and I wanted to share the latest development milestone in the game, which is a (almost) fully functional Nav display!

Unlike other games such as Kerbal Space Program, all of the systems, displays, maps, indicators, etc are embedded in the spacecraft display and are a part of your cockpit. The same goes for the 3D Nav display, which is used to see the whole solar system and planetary orbits, prepare maneuvers, calculate rendezvous and encounters, plan your delta-v usage, etc.

I'd love to get feedback on this design so feel free to share your thoughts or questions in the comments, and if you like how this looks - please support the development by wishlisting the game on Steam!

**Saturday, September 5th, 10 AM Eastern**

I'm playing NTL: No Time Left, live next Saturday here:

https://youtube.com/live/MPF-X_p8lYQ?feature=share

Mark it on your calendar or leave a comment down below. It is going to be epic.

List anything you want to see or just get your questions ready.

Would you like to know more?

This is your chance. Things are ramping up and schedules are getting tighter. The next few months will fly by and it is only with the support of the community that any of this is possible.

Can't wait for the livestream? Come join me in the Discord:
Service guarantees citizenship - https://discord.gg/GDdpCmp7fS

I have released version 0.30-1 of sfsim.

sfsim is a realistic 3D space flight simulator under development. You can already download the sfsim playtest build on Steam and try it out. sfsim uses true celestial positions of Earth and Sun from NASA. Use an advanced single-stage-to-orbit space craft to take off, orbit the planet, perform reentry, and land back on Earth. sfsim features a true to scale Earth planet using NOAA elevation data and procedurally generated volumetric clouds.

This release introduces a major overhaul of the rendering code as well as a runway for the spacecraft. The rendering system is implemented using the Clojure programming language as well as GLSL. LWJGL3 is used to access the graphics card’s OpenGL bindings.

The new rendering code uses deferred shading, which first computes and stores per-pixel geometry data in a geometry buffer (G-buffer), then calculates each pixel’s final lighting in a separate shader pass. Deferred shading makes it easy to render decals, which are essentially textures projected onto scene geometry. It also enables efficient real-time rendering of many localized light sources.

Deferred rendering splits rendering into stages so geometry is processed first, lighting later.

Geometry Pass

Projecting Geometry

The scene is made of triangles. A vertex shader is used to project the triangles which are passed to the rasterizer. For the planet mesh, the geometry is further refined through tessellation and geometry shaders. The geometry pass draws all visible geometry and stores per-pixel surface data into multiple buffers (textures) as shown below instead of computing final lighting immediately.

Although the runway could be rendered as a decal in a separate pass, it was chosen to render it within the same shader as the planet. This will make it easier to later adopt runtime virtual texturing, for example to render airport ground surfaces with markings.

Diffuse buffer

The diffuse buffer stores the base RGB color of the material at each pixel. There is also an emissive buffer for light-emitting surfaces which is not shown here.

Material property buffer

The metallic buffer stores a scalar indicating how reflective the material at each pixel is. The buffer with specular strength (inverse roughness) is not shown here.

Normal buffer

The normal buffer stores the surface normal vector at each pixel in the camera coordinate system. Normals are useful lateron in order to determine the incident angle of incoming light.

View-space Position buffer

The view-space position buffer stores the 3D position of the surface visible at each pixel. This data is useful for computing atmospheric scattering and the distance to local light sources during the subsequent lighting pass.

Lighting pass

During the lighting pass, the G-buffer and a shadow map are used to calculate per-pixel lighting. Blending can also be used in this pass to update the lighting of only part of the scene, without evaluating every light source at every pixel. This image shows the shaded result produced with a Phong model.

Atmospheric effects

Phong shading computes the surface color after lighting. The lighting shader also accounts for atmospheric scattering. Atmospheric scattering both adds in-scattered light and removes part of the incoming light through scattering.

Final compositing

The volumetric clouds are rendered separately using a lower resolution. The lighting pass then incorporates the cloud layer using depth-aware upsampling.

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Let me know if your space game uses some nice tricks I have missed 😄 .

Don’t forget to wishlist sfsim!

Hey guys,

between these two games, which would you get? I want something that I can play awhile in spurts (not much free time). Both seem similar, so if you have experience with them, which did you like more? TIA.