OUTBETWEEN
A young star cluster glowing blue inside a red nebula, the galaxy's disc across the top of the frame

Starscape Engine Pre-alpha

Build games in a universe.

One galaxy at true scale, every star, planet and moon in it generated, from the rocks at your feet to the far side of the galaxy. Fly from a planet's ground to another star without a loading screen.

See it What it does

Every image on this site is a frame from the engine, rendered in real time.

A whole galaxy, all the way down

Starscape is a universe engine for games. You don't build levels. The engine builds the galaxy, and your game happens somewhere in it.

A black hole bending the light of the galaxy behind it into rings

Every star, born and evolved

Stars come from their populations and age as real ones do, so brown and white dwarfs, giants, neutron stars and black holes are all there, each drawn as its kind. A third of systems have two or more stars, with planets around one star or both.

A blue and green living world seen from orbit, half in shadow

Worlds of every kind

Each planet and moon is a kind of world, worked out from its warmth, size, air, water and tides: living worlds, oceans, deserts, lava worlds, ice moons, hazy moons and more, each dressed to look like itself.

The curve of a planet's horizon above a deck of white clouds

Real skies and weather

Skies scatter light the way air does, with clouds that drift on the planet's own winds. Terrain and clouds cast shadows, moons eclipse their suns, and light comes through the air in shafts.

A plain covered with dark conifer trees under a pale sky

Down to the ground

Terrain streams in from the GPU with detail down to a meter: materials, seas and ice, and rocks, boulders, trees, shrubs and grass scattered over it. The rules for all of it can be changed in JSON or C#.

Rocks of a planet's ring floating in front of a banded gas giant

Things to find out there

Comets with their tails, asteroid and Kuiper belts, and rings you can fly into among the rocks. The galaxy holds nebulae of every kind, lit by the stars that live in them.

A moon's shadow falling on the face of a banded giant planet

The same universe for everyone

Every random value is worked out from where it is, not drawn from a shared generator, and the math gives the same bits on every machine. Two players at the same place and time see the same world.

Made for games

A game runs on top of the engine and talks to it through a public API, the same one any other game gets. It can ask the universe questions:

  • What's the ground under this point, and what is it made of?
  • Where does this ray hit the terrain?
  • What's the gravity here?
  • What rocks and plants are near this point, or along this ray?
  • What are the clouds and weather here, at any time?

Crafts can orbit, land and meet each other, stepped under gravity and thrust.

Under the hood

Language
C# on .NET 10
Graphics
Vulkan 1.3, HDR, shaders in Slang
GPU work
Batch jobs written in C#, turned into GPU code at build time
Determinism
The same bits on every machine, CPU path and GPU
Platform
Windows today, tested on NVIDIA; AMD, Intel and Linux to come

Roadmap

Each milestone is proven by a sample game built on the engine's public API.

  1. M1

    Every world looks like itself

    Stars, worlds, skies, weather, nebulae, belts and rings. Done.

  2. M2

    A game can be written

    The host a game runs in, input, models, audio and text. Under way now.

  3. M3

    The world remembers

    Objects placed on worlds, saving and loading, and collision.

  4. M4

    On foot and aboard

    Walking on a turning planet, rovers, cockpits and interiors.

  5. M5

    Ship it

    Releases, a license, more GPUs, and Linux.

Get Starscape

Starscape Engine is in pre-alpha and isn't available to download yet. When it's ready, releases will be right here.

Download coming soon