Is this a game? It's certainly like an activity. It's a tool or a program. Don't think it's much of a game. To the extent that's important. It's more like building a model train set or learning how to do surgery on one of those lifelike robot patients in med school.
It's fun for a couple hours. Throwing planets and stars at other planets and stars. Dropping a black hole in the middle of the solar system and watching everything fly and fling about.
Performance is dodgy. Which sure I understand. It's an insane amount to simulate. The more bodies and more interactions being simulated the worse the performance. Makes sense. Some scenes or aspects are very, very pretty. Others the textures are pretty poor. The tutorial is very cute and fun, easy to follow but ultimately doesn't provide you with very much. A little more guided tours for creating certain types of planets or scenes would be appreciated (there are additional guides but quality is highly variable).
It's a better scene painter than it is much anything else at the moment and with that in mind I find performance to be lacking because of the faithful simulation quality. It is great but for the large bulk of would-be users I have to imagine more simple triggers to sort of create desired scenes would be great. Dragging two stars near one another and clicking a 'make binary system' button, followed by then adding a habitable zone and then choosing from a variety of settings to make a planet that would be automatically habitable within said zone with a desired climate type.
The game handles all of that already if you do it manually. The parameters are knowable parameters. The game could help you significantly by implementing such sort of shortcuts. Instead you have to toil with building them from scratch which does serve to teach you just how hard it is to terraform something and ultimately how unlikely and happenstance life at all seems to be. Maybe that's its own lesson and its own gameplay narrative right there.
Is it entertaining? Sure. For a couple hours. Whaddya supposed to do with it after? I'm not rightly sure. People are undoubtedly simulating more advanced versions of intergalactic interplay with far more sophisticated models and machines. There are other programs that are better for the 'build your own pretty picture' aspect that this one brings. And there are probably better programs out there for simulating terraforming. So in the end what exactly Universe Sandbox gives you is unclear to me. But it still is a sort of neat little oddity nonetheless
It's fun for a couple hours. Throwing planets and stars at other planets and stars. Dropping a black hole in the middle of the solar system and watching everything fly and fling about.
Performance is dodgy. Which sure I understand. It's an insane amount to simulate. The more bodies and more interactions being simulated the worse the performance. Makes sense. Some scenes or aspects are very, very pretty. Others the textures are pretty poor. The tutorial is very cute and fun, easy to follow but ultimately doesn't provide you with very much. A little more guided tours for creating certain types of planets or scenes would be appreciated (there are additional guides but quality is highly variable).
It's a better scene painter than it is much anything else at the moment and with that in mind I find performance to be lacking because of the faithful simulation quality. It is great but for the large bulk of would-be users I have to imagine more simple triggers to sort of create desired scenes would be great. Dragging two stars near one another and clicking a 'make binary system' button, followed by then adding a habitable zone and then choosing from a variety of settings to make a planet that would be automatically habitable within said zone with a desired climate type.
The game handles all of that already if you do it manually. The parameters are knowable parameters. The game could help you significantly by implementing such sort of shortcuts. Instead you have to toil with building them from scratch which does serve to teach you just how hard it is to terraform something and ultimately how unlikely and happenstance life at all seems to be. Maybe that's its own lesson and its own gameplay narrative right there.
Is it entertaining? Sure. For a couple hours. Whaddya supposed to do with it after? I'm not rightly sure. People are undoubtedly simulating more advanced versions of intergalactic interplay with far more sophisticated models and machines. There are other programs that are better for the 'build your own pretty picture' aspect that this one brings. And there are probably better programs out there for simulating terraforming. So in the end what exactly Universe Sandbox gives you is unclear to me. But it still is a sort of neat little oddity nonetheless