Games

Roger Cheng

MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries

About three months ago this blog lost momentum. I wrote down some notes after building my first “real” web app with Budibase, and I neglected to write down what I’ve been doing since. I should try to get back to it, and I’ll start with what I’ve spent much of my free time on: the game MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries. I bought the “JumpShip Edition” bundle some time back and the game didn’t immediately grab my attention. After watching a friend play the game for a while, though, I was able to get back into it. Much too far into it, as it turned out. Sucking up all my free time including time I would have spent documenting stuff on this blog. I guess that counts as an endorsement of the game.

I count myself among the old-school PC games who remember MechWarrior 2 as a landmark title of its age. Given how fast gaming franchises turn over new ways to milk money from their audience, it took a surprising amount of time to get from MW2 to MW5. But now that it is here and it has “clicked” in my mind, I couldn’t tear myself away. Big fighting robots, man, can’t beat that.

Part of what makes a MechWarrior game is obsessing over how to best configure each machine under my command. There are a lot of options in the mech lab, easily overwhelming a beginner. And yet, that is only a simplified version of the full complexity available in the original board game. I’ve learned there’s a robust modding scene with many published options on Steam Workshop, and some of these modes expose many more customization options. I decided against going down that route: the stock mech lab is quite enough for me to manage.

I can’t say too much about the two DLCs that came as part of the JumpShip Edition I bought: they were present throughout my entire MW5:Mercs experience so I can’t tell how they’ve added to the game and whether they’d be worth spending money for someone who doesn’t already have them. By the same token, I can’t say much about the remaining DLCs because I don’t have them.

The game environment is a huge step over the simple terrain of MechWarrior 2, not surprising given the age difference. Yet the environment felt very antiseptic. There are no animals in the forest scurrying out of your way, and there are no cars driving around in the city. I also never saw any depiction of human beings at human scale, even though it was depicted in some of the transition graphics. This cut both ways: when I am hired to destroy a military base, it would be cool to see pilots running to the cockpits of mechs powering up to defend against my attack. On the other hand, mercenaries are occasionally hired under distasteful contracts to destroy population centers. I don’t need to see myself mowing down a mom and her stroller. I decided it was just as well the game is unrealistic in that way.

While there are scripted campaign missions in the game, the core game loop is structured around randomly generated contracts. This is great, because my obsession session has completed every single campaign mission and most of the challenges I had set out for myself. Now all I have is the open world (open galaxy, actually) baseline level of play where I can jump in, do a handful of missions, then quit and get back to my life. Some people play Solitaire for a few minutes of distraction, I play MW5: Mercenaries for a few missions before returning to my projects.

[Pictured: one of my self-assigned challenges, making a perfect shot on an Atlas-class mech.]

Roger Cheng

Idea: Unity LEGO Microgame in VR

A quick survey found no official LEGO-branded VR titles, but there were a few LEGO-adjacent brick building VR titles each catering to slightly different target demographic. And it’s quite possible that people would find none of them appealing, since VR is still a new area of development and has no shortage of novel ideas that might be worth a try. [Update: there is a LEGO MR title now.]

Unity 3D built its userbase on the sales pitch of realizing ideas quickly and go to market. While a competent software development team can write their own variation of all functionalities provided by Unity, it might not be cost/time effective to do so. Might it be true here? Here’s what I see after thinking over such a project idea:

Take LEGO Art Assets…

To prototype a LEGO VR idea in Unity, it wouldn’t be necessary to build LEGO art assets from scratch. There’s already a lot available in the Unity LEGO Microgame tutorial. Certainly not the full slate of LEGO pieces, but more than enough to try out ideas. If those ideas pan out, only then would the legal questions come into play. There were a lot of Terms & Conditions attached to the officially licensed LEGO assets made available for the Unity tutorial, preventing any commercial exploitation. As I understand it, we can’t even publish it for free except at the dedicated Unity tutorial sharing portal. Which is based on WebGL and runs within a browser, so it’s probably not a VR-friendly deployment.

Hobbyists toying with ideas are probably fine, anybody contemplating going beyond will need to hire lawyers.

Add Unity XR Interaction Toolkit…

The Unity LEGO Microgame tutorial plays from an over-the-sholuder third-person perspective using standard game movement. (Keyboard WASD, gamepad joystick, etc.) To port that into a VR environment, we can pull in Unity’s XR Interaction Toolkit which is advertised to handle all of the low-level VR/AR mechanics. Things shared by all VR titles like tying headset movement into camera movement. Interfacing with generic VR handheld controller capabilities, from buzzing motor tactile feedback to piping controller motion and position back into the game engine.

Then Things Get Complicated!

Once we have a simplified palette of LEGO art assets to work with, and low-level VR infrastructure taken care of, the challenge is designing the user experience for a fun game. This is the hard part. As an improvement over non-VR LEGO titles (Builder’s Journey, Bricktales, etc) I wanted to make camera viewpoint control intuitive by tying it to VR headset movement. Moving a LEGO brick around means somehow tying it to the 6DOF data coming in from a handheld controller. These would be the foundational aspects of building LEGO bricks in VR.

Things get more uncertain from there. What’s the best way to organize and manage the palette of available LEGO pieces in a VR environment? I don’t want to put up virtual shelves of boxes of LEGO pieces that a user has to go paw through, that would be an unnecessary and frustrating level of skeuomorphism. We’re in a digital world, we should be able to build what’s effectively a database query to narrow down the set of pieces we want. How would that work in a VR world? I feel there’s room for improvement (even without VR) over some existing search mechanisms for LEGO parts (examples from LDraw and Bricklink) but it’s only a vague feeling without any well thought out design proposals on my part.

Once we have a part in our virtual hand, we have an entirely different set of problems. We’d need what amounts to a physics engine that can solve constraints of LEGO pieces fitting together. For the classic LEGO build experience, it would need to understand how LEGO studs fit together. To support Technic-style studless construction, it would need to understand the pins and holes on the beams. If ambition gets as far as building and running Technic motors and gearboxes… I don’t even know where to start.

So, Probably Not

This is where my line of thought stopped. At this point it is already far more ambitious of a project than I can reasonably expect to carry to completion. I’ll shelve the project idea so not to bite off more than I can chew. I’m sure somebody (or multiple somebodies) will take a stab at the general idea. I wish them success and look forward to playing around with what they’ve built.

[UPDATE: After writing the above, search engines picked up on my interest and showed me links to BrickMasterVR, another brick-building VR title currently under development.]

Roger Cheng

Building with (Non-LEGO) Bricks in VR

I failed to find any LEGO VR titles, though that search did teach me there are ways to put existing non-VR games into VR headsets with a special video driver. Maybe there’ll be official LEGO licensed VR titles in the future [UPDATE: the future has arrived] but if that’s something I really want now, there are several LEGO-adjacent VR titles.

Minecraft VR

The most obvious is Minecraft, which has frequently been described as a digital-native counterpart to LEGO. Looks like there’s a way to explore and build Minecraft worlds with a VR client. Based on the screenshots I found, it doesn’t look like they changed the game very much for this VR adaptation. In other words, probably not much more than running a standard client under vorpX.

BricksVR

Minecraft may have transferred a lot of LEGO ethos to the digital world, but it doesn’t look much like actual LEGO pieces. BricksVR is much more LEGO-like in its bricks, and has a great deal focus on multiplayer online activities. Both in terms of sharing creations online and in terms of multiplayer interactions. Building together, exploring built creations together, and looks like they even have brick-based multiplayer mini games.

The SteamVR version of BricksVR has been discontinued, purportedly due to low player count. This is now exclusive to the Oculus ecosystem. The game is still under development (it was “Early Access” on Steam before taken offline, and is still in “App Lab” for Oculus) so maybe they just wanted to focus on one platform while they get things nailed down. Perhaps they’re trying to hook into Meta’s whole Metaverse thing? I don’t know. What I do know is that, unless I want to shell out a couple hundred bucks for an Oculus headset, BricksVR is out of my reach.

Brickbuilder VR

In contrast, Brickbuilder VR (also “Early Access” on Steam) looks much more interesting. It doesn’t seem to have the multiplayer capabilities of BricksVR, but it has something much more interesting to me: LEGO Technics style of hardware creations. Look at this screenshot from the Steam store page for Brickbuilder VR:

I see gears, I see axles, I see levers, I see linear motion rails. Even a virtual remote control for a motor, currently active on Channel 1. Promotional material for Brickbuilder VR also included footage of a clock, a model of a steam locomotive, and other “functional” machinery. This looks really cool! The Steam reviews, unfortunately, made it clear Brickbuilder VR still needs more bake time. Many reports of crashes and other undesirable behavior, and its VR interface is still under-developed. Ah well, I can keep an eye on it to see if it matures into something interesting.

What about “if you want it done, do it yourself”? I briefly toyed with the idea of building my own LEGO VR experiment. Many foundational pieces are already in place, but things get complicated quickly.

[UPDATE: After writing the above, search engines picked up on my interest and showed me links to BrickMasterVR, another brick-building VR title currently under development.]

Roger Cheng

Some of My Virtual Reality Favorites

I’ve just upgraded my VR system to a Valve Index headset backed by a Dell XPS 8950, displaying graphics generated by a RTX 3080 and a Core i7-12700 feeding it data. I thought this was a good checkpoint to pause and write down a few of my personal VR highlights in the years since I entered the world of 6DoF PC VR with a HP Windows Mixed Reality headset.

Beat Saber

A simple concept executed brilliantly, Beat Saber is an easily understood pick-up-and-play VR experience that showcases 6DoF headset tracking integrating video with audio. There may have been predecessors I don’t know about, but the success of Beat Saber made way for an entire genre of VR rhythm games that followed.

Gameplay perspective only moves as the player moves, minimizing chances of motion sickness. Graphically simple blocks meant this title was a great fit for computationally limited hardware like the Oculus Quest. If Beat Saber was the only thing I played in VR, I wouldn’t need to upgrade my PC: it was fine running Beat Saber at 120Hz with a Valve Index.

Valve Index controllers felt much more secure in my hand than the old controllers, letting me focus more on swinging my arms and less worry on gripping tightly to ensure my controllers don’t go flying.

Moss (and Moss: Book II)

I loved this experience of stepping into a fairytale storybook. Our gameplay perspective is of a human sized entity looking around the mouse-sized world of our protagonist. Like Beat Saber, our perspective only moves as we move. Though not much movement were required, as these games were designed to be compatible with a seated experience.

This game would stutter on my previous PC even with graphic level set to low. While Moss is more graphically demanding than Beat Saber, it was far short of the level of Half-Life: Alyx yet felt similarly demanding of hardware. I suspect they have not been fully optimized for PC as they were built first for PlayStation VR and ported to PC afterwards. I read these titles are also available on Oculus Quest. If true, those ports must have required some pretty significant performance optimization work.

Half-LIfe: Alyx

The original Half-Life was a groundbreaking title that raised the bar on what a PC FPS shooter could be. Now Half-Life: Alyx has done the same for VR. It is an incredibly immersive experience to feel like I’m standing in the middle of City 17, what’s left of a human city on a planet Earth under brutal alien occupation.

Unlike the previous two titles, the gameplay perspective needs to move for us to adventure through City 17. The game designers have done an admirable job implementing traversal while minimizing risks of motion sickness, but it still isn’t as comfortable for me as the fixed positions of Beat Saber or Moss. Despite the occasional discomfort I would frequently revisit Half-Life: Alyx and have played through the campaign multiple times. Frequently pausing to just drink in the atmosphere.

My previous PC could almost run Alyx at 120Hz with graphics set on low fidelity, but a stutter once every 10-15 seconds was nauseating. My new PC runs stutter-free on high fidelity settings.

Star Wars: Squadrons

My big “a-ha” moment in VR came while I was sitting in a virtual cockpit of Elite: Dangerous feeling like I’m actually at the controls of a spaceship. Now I have a much better choice: Star Wars: Squadrons optional VR mode. The game can be played without VR on a monitor, but that doesn’t make me feel like I’m at the controls of a starfighter. My big VR moment in this game was sitting in an X-Wing looking over my shoulder to see my R2 unit chirping away. Hell yeah.

The game designers must have known people would love to just cruise through a fleet looking at all the ships we recognize from the movies. Before the action starts on our first New Republic mission, we can fly our X-Wing around a Mon Calamari cruiser task group. Extra bonus: this game lets us fly for both sides, so there’s a counterpart Imperial mission where we launch a TIE Fighter right out of the belly of an Imperial Star Destroyer and can circle around to admire its assault force through our viewports.

That alone was worth the price of admission, which is good because the actual gameplay is disorienting on two levels. First is the expected motion sickness issue: maneuvering a starfighter while I’m actually seated at my computer quickly made me uncomfortable. But I also struggled to maintain situational awareness during missions. Where is my objective? Where are other members of my squadron? Where are my threats in surrounding space? It takes me a few seconds to get oriented and, in that time, an enemy gets on my tail and starts shooting. I go into evasive maneuvers to fight for my life. If I survive, I have to get reoriented, and the cycle starts again.

I only got a handful of missions into the single-player campaign before my skill fell short of the required skill level, and I never bothered to try online multiplayer squadron assaults. But I have launched the game many times just to replay those first missions. $40 is a lot for Star Wars: Fly Around the Fleet but I paid it willingly.

Honorable Mention: the opening menu for Star Trek: Bridge Crew is shown as pretense of a Starfleet shuttlecraft control panel. We’re seated in the shuttlecraft as it flies around Stardock waiting for us to choose what to do. I would load up the game just to admire USS Enterprise docked outside.

And as far as I can tell, none of these experiences will be available on Apple’s upcoming Vision Pro.

Roger Cheng

Superdrive SV200 Wheel and Pedals

Playing Forza Horizon 5 on my Xbox Series X made me think about getting a steering wheel controller. (Again.) For this effort, I decided to start cheap. Before I spend a lot of money on this I need to know I enjoy a wheel more than a controller thumb stick and, more importantly, that I actually spend time driving with the wheel. If I actually do both and find the cheap wheel wanting, then I can justify spending more money on a better wheel. I bought the cheapest wheel I could find on Amazon that day, a Superdrive SV200. (*)

It is advertised to be compatible with almost everything out there (PC, Xbox One, Switch, PlayStation 3 and 4 but not 5) which had the unfortunate side effect of multiple labels on each button. The user is expected to figure out which labels applied to their setup, which is a bit annoying but inevitable at this end of the market. The wheel diameter is much smaller than typical of actual cars, but it’s big enough for me to grasp with both hands and more importantly not a tiny joystick with no resemblance to a steering wheel. Said wheel rotates through 180 degrees range of motion smoothly, but there’s quite a bit of play in the plastic mechanism allowing the wheel to flex a few degrees in every direction. Jury is still out on whether that flex is a problem. There are only two pedals. Their range of motion is small, but enough for me to modulate brake and throttle. Which makes them better than certain cheap analog potentiometers I’ve encountered in the past. But more importantly, the pedals feel sturdy enough I’m not worried about breaking them in the heat of a race.

Connectivity is via a USB cable, no wireless connection here. I thought maybe the electronics would present themselves as a USB HID controller of some sort, but it wasn’t quite that simple because I was expected to assemble a chain of devices by plugging my Xbox Core controller into the wheel. (Xbox –(USB Cable)–> SV200 –(USB Cable)–> Xbox controller.) I guess this was a way for SV200 to gain Xbox connectivity without paying Xbox licensing fees?

With Xbox controller plugged in to SV200, which is then plugged into the Xbox console, I brought up the controller information panel. It shows a single controller and not two. I wonder if the SV200 intercepts USB messages between the console and the controller? Whatever the mechanism was, it meant I could use the wheel and the Xbox thinks it’s coming from the controller. For feedback I get generic rumbling effects on the wheel instead of the controller as well. But not totally reliably: sometimes the controller starts rumbling instead of the wheel and I don’t know why. I just know it startled me whenever it happened.

SV200 appears to only convey controller level in-palm rumble, it is not a force feedback wheel and does not convey road texture and traction as expensive wheels advertise of doing. It also lacks the tactile trigger feedback of a standard Xbox One controller. In Forza Horizon, throttle trigger rumble signals traction control is active and brake trigger rumble for anti-lock brakes. I’ve come to appreciate that feedback and I might miss them when they’re gone. On the To-Do list: investigate whether more expensive peripherals include such feedback motors in their pedals.

Before I can decide how I feel about wheel flex or trigger rumbles, I have a more immediate problem. The SV200 is small and lightweight which is good at saving space but bad for staying still on my coffee table. The Xbox360 wheel had a sturdy clamp, but this wheel had only four small suction cups woefully inadequate for holding in place. I can’t really evaluate whether driving with this wheel is worth the effort when I’m constantly distracted working to keep the wheel in place. I need to fasten it more securely.

(*) Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Roger Cheng

Forza Horizon 5 Makes Me Want a Wheel Again

I’ve been a fan of the Forza Horizon series of games since the first one, where we cruised through highlights of Colorado, USA. I recently started playing the latest edition Forza Horizon 5 (*) taking place in a fictionalized Mexico. And as is typical when playing a driving game, I find it somewhat unsatisfying to use a standard (“Core”) Xbox gaming controller. I started thinking about getting a steering wheel controller again. I tried it once before in the Xbox 360 era, but that ended in a teardown treatment as I didn’t use my 360 anymore.

That disassembled steering wheel was a first-party Microsoft accessory with full Xbox 360 branding. For the Xbox One era (including current Xbox Series S|X) Microsoft decided against making a first-party steering wheel peripheral. Instead, that market has been delegated to the existing peripheral ecosystem. We have a whole spectrum of options starting from very inexpensive sets made by manufacturers I’ve never heard of, up through midrange offerings from mainstream peripheral makers like Logitech and Thrustmaster, up through serious simulation components that cost more than the Xbox console itself.

I decided to start all the way at the cheapest end of the spectrum for two reasons: One, I’ve already tried steering wheels once with the Xbox 360 wheel and didn’t use it as much as I thought I would. If history repeats itself at least I’ve wasted less money. And second, going cheap means I’ll be less intimidated about hacking into the wheel for my own customizations. I concede if I wanted a durable wheel to hack on, I should have kept my Xbox 360 wheel, but too late now.

The lowest Amazon bidder of the day was ~$60 for a Superdrive SV200. (*) Just a small wheel, a few buttons, and two minimalist pedals. Looking on Superdrive’s own website, it appears to be a French company which was a surprise. I didn’t know there were French companies in this space, good for them. The product it was still manufactured in China, and that part was no surprise.

I ordered one and waited for its arrival.

(*) Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Roger Cheng

Conveyer Belt Routing of “Freshly Frosted” Puzzle Game

One of the items on my to-do list is to sit down and gain proficiency in KiCad, the open-source electronic circuit board design software suite. I have had the “Getting Started” guide open in a browser tab for months! I’ve played around with it before to produce simple schematics and board layouts, and I remember routing wires in a schematic/on a board is not an exact science. There’s no one best practice, it’s more of an art that the skilled practitioner can do far better than a beginner. Looking at all the places a wire has to visit, avoiding the places it should not visit, and repeat the process for more wires keeping them out of each other’s way. It tickles a very specific part of my brain.

The same part of my brain came out to play recently in an entirely different context: the single player puzzle game “Freshly Frosted“. A given game board is the floor of a doughnut factory, with all the machines of the assembly line already installed. Our job is to route conveyer belt, so a plain doughnut receives the proper toppings (or none at all) on their way to the delivery counter. Simple in concept, but there is surprising depth. The game has a total of 144 levels, organized by a dozen doughnuts in a dozen boxes. The first level of each box is always very easy, but it introduces a new concept. Each level in the box uses the same concept but increases difficulty. By the time we get to the twelfth and final level of the box, we have a serious challenge on our hands. Fortunately, the game lets us skip levels to a limited degree, so we can set aside some of these challenging puzzles for later.

I felt the levels were accurately sorted by difficulty, which ramps up smoothly. The jump from one level to the next never felt jarring. In my personal experience, most the first box was easily solved within a minute, and I was almost ready to write it off as a simple kid’s game until level 1-11. This eleventh level of the first box was the first one where I had to sit and think over the problem for a bit before I could figure it out. Level 3-12 (final level of the third box) was the first puzzle where I had to leave the game and ponder the problem overnight before I solved it. (Picture of this post.)

My only gripe about this game is a handful of puzzles that didn’t just depend on order of operation, they also depended on the timing of those operations. I would get very close and, to cross the finish line, I had to lengthen or shorten certain belts to adjust timing. I did not enjoy those puzzles, because I end up spending a lot of time struggling to fine tune timing instead of the more enjoyable and rewarding adventure of solving to fit logical constraints. But this fits with my KiCad analogy, where we’d have to struggle with keeping lengths of differential signal wire pairs the same. Routing and timing, just like circuit design!

I wouldn’t go as far as to call Freshly Frosted “PCB Routing: The Game” but it’s pretty darned close. A skilled Freshly Frosted player may or may not find it easier to learn KiCad routing, but I expect it to exercise relevant portions of the brain either way. For the month of November 2022, Freshly Frosted is free for Amazon Prime members to play on Amazon’s Luna game streaming service. Otherwise, it is ~$10 on all the supported game platform stores. Steam for PC, Microsoft Xbox, etc. Highly recommended from me!

Roger Cheng

Notes on “Hardspace:Shipbreaker” Release

Just before 2021 ended I bought the game Hardspace:Shipbreaker in an incomplete early-access state. I had a lot of fun despite its flaws. In May, the game exited early-access to become an official release, followed quickly by a 1.1 release. This post documents a few observations from an enthusiastic player.

The best news: many annoying bugs were fixed! A few examples:

  • Temperature Control Units no longer invisibly attach ship exterior to interior.
  • Waste Disposal Units are no longer glued to adjacent plates.
  • Armor Plates could be separated for barge recycling separately from the adjacent hull plate, which goes to the processor.

Sadly, not all of my annoyance points were fixed. The worst one is “same button for picking up a part and pushing it away”. That is still the case, and I still occasionally blast some parts off into space when I intended to grab them, which meant I have to waste time chasing them down.

The most charming new feature are variations on ship interiors. The 0.7 release had variations on exterior livery that corresponded to fictional companies that owned and used these ships, but the interior had been generically identical. Now there are a few cosmetic variations, and I was most amused by the green carpet in old passenger liners. It gave me a real fun 70s vibe in a futuristic spaceship.

The most useful new feature is the ability to save partial ship salvage progress. Version 0.7 lacked this feature and it meant once we started a ship, we were committed to keeping the game running until we were done. (Either by playing through multiple shifts in one sitting or leaving the computer on and running the game until we could return.) Saving ship progress allows us to save and quit the game and return to our partially complete ship later. This feature noticeably lengthens game load and save times, but I think it is a worthwhile tradeoff.

In version 0.7, the single-player campaign plotline only went to an Act II cliffhanger. It now has an Act III conclusion, but that did not make the plot more appealing to me. The antagonist went too far and entered the realm of annoying caricature. Note I did not say “unrealistic” because there definitely exist people who climb into positions of power in order to abuse others. I’ve had to deal with that in real workplaces and didn’t enjoy having that in my fictional workplace. I was also disappointed with the storybook depiction of unionization, real life union-busting is far more brutal. Though I don’t particularly need to experience that in my entertainment, either. But aside from imposing some pauses in the shipbreaking action, the single player plotline does not impact the core game loop of taking ships apart. Lastly: the “little old space truck” side quest now ties into the conclusion, because getting it fixed up is your ticket out of that hellhole.

Based on earlier information, the development team should now be focused on releasing this title for game consoles. I’ve been playing it using a game controller on my PC and found it made an acceptable tradeoff with its own upsides and downsides relative to keyboard-and-mouse. I hope it will do well on consoles, I want to see more puzzle-solving teardown games on the market.

But the reason I started playing this game at all was because I had been learning about Unity game engine’s new Data Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS) and wanted to see an application of it in action. As much as I enjoyed the game, I hadn’t forgotten the educational side of my project.

Roger Cheng

Notes on “Hardspace: Shipbreaker” 0.7

I have spent entirely too much time playing Hardspace: Shipbreaker, but it’s been very enjoyable time spent. As of this writing, it is a Steam Early Access title and still in development. The build I’ve been playing is V.0.7.0.217552 dated December 20th, 2021. (Only a few days before I bought it on Steam.) The developers have announced their goal to take it out of Early Access and formally release in Spring 2022. Comments below from my experience do not necessarily reflect the final product.

The game can be played in career mode, where ship teardowns are accompanied by a storyline campaign. My 0.7 build only went up to act 2, the formal release should have an act 3. Personally, I did not find the story compelling. This fictional universe placed the player as an indentured servant toiling for an uncaring mega-corporation, and that’s depressing. It’s too close to the real world of capitalism run amok.

Career mode has several difficulty settings. I started with the easiest “Open Shift” that removes the stress of managing consumables like my spacesuit oxygen. It also removes the time limit of a “shift” which is fifteen minutes. After I moved up to “Standard” difficulty, the oxygen limit is indeed stressful. But I actually started appreciating the fifteen-minute limit timer because it encourages me to take a break from this game.

Whatever the game mode (career, free play or competitive race) the core game is puzzle-solving: How to take apart a spaceship quickly and efficiently to maximize revenue. My workspace is a dockyard in earth orbit, and each job takes apart a ship and sort them into one of three recycle bins:

  1. Barge: equipment kept intact. Examples: flight terminal computers, temperature control units, power cells, reactors.
  2. Processor: high value materials. Examples: exterior hull plates, structural members.
  3. Furnace: remainder of materials. Example: interior trim.

We don’t need to aim at these recycle bins particularly carefully, as they have an attraction field to suck in nearby objects. Unfortunately, these force fields are also happy to pull in objects we didn’t intend to deposit. Occasionally an object would fall just right between the bins and they would steal from each other!

I haven’t decided if the hungry processors/furnaces is a bug, or an intended challenge to the game. There are arguments to be made either way. However, the physics engine in the game exhibit behavior that are definitely bugs. Personally, what catches me off guard the most are small events with outsized effects. The most easily reproducible artifact is to interact with a large ship fragment. Our tractor beam can’t move a hull segment several thousand kilograms in mass. But if we use the same tractor beam to pick up a small 10 kilogram component and rub it against the side of the hull segment, the hull segment starts moving.

Another characteristic of the physics engine is that everything has infinite tensile strength. As long as there is a connection, no matter how small, the entire assembly remains rigid. It means when we try to cut the ship in half, each half weighting tens of thousands of kilograms, we could overlook one tiny thing holding it all together. My most frustrating experience was a piece of fabric trim. A bolt of load-bearing fabric holding the ship together!

But at least that’s something I can look for and see connected onscreen. Even more frustrating are bugs where ship parts are held together by objects that are visibly apart on screen. Like a Temperature Control Unit that doesn’t look attached to an exterior hull plate, but it had to be removed from its interior mount at which point both the TCU and the hull are free to move. Or the waste disposal unit that rudely juts out beyond its allotted square.

Since the game is under active development, I see indications of game mechanics that was not available to me. It’s not clear to me if these are mechanisms that used to exist and removed, or if they are promised and yet to come. Example: there were multiple mentions of using coolant to put out fires, and I could collect coolant canisters, but I don’t see how I can apply coolant to things on fire. Another example: there are hints that our cutter capability can be upgraded, but I encountered no upgrade opportunity and must resort to demolition charges. (Absent an upgrade, it’s not possible to cut directly into hull as depicted by game art.) We also have a side-quest to fix up a little space truck, but right now nothing happens when the quest is completed.

The ships being dismantled are one of several types, so we know roughly what to expect. However, each ship includes randomized variations so no two ships are dismantled in exactly the same way. This randomization is occasionally hilarious. For example, sometimes the room adjacent to the reactor has a window and computers to resemble a reactor control room. But sometimes the room is set up like crew quarters with chairs and beds. It must be interesting to serve on board that ship, as we bunk down next to a big reactor through the window and its radioactive warning symbols.

There are a few user interface annoyances. The “F” key is used to pick up certain items in game. But the same key is also used to fire a repulsion field to push items away. Depending on the mood of the game engine, sometimes I press “F” to pick up an item only to blast it away instead and I have to chase it down.

But these are all fixable problems and I look forward to the official version 1.0 release. In the meantime I’m still having lots of fun playing in version 0.7. And maybe down the line the developers will have the bandwidth to explore putting this game in virtual reality.

Roger Cheng

Spaceship Teardowns in “Hardspace: Shipbreaker”

While studying Unity’s upcoming Data-Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS) I browsed various resources on the Unity landing page for this technology preview. Several game studios have already started using DOTS in their titles and Unity showcased a few of them. One of the case studies is Hardspace:Shipbreaker, and it has consumed all of my free time (and then some.)

I decided to look into this game because the name and visuals were vaguely familiar. After playing a while I remembered I first saw it on Scott Manley’s YouTube channel. He made that episode soon after the game was available on Steam. But the game has changed a lot in the past year, as it is an “Early Access Game” that is still undergoing development. (Windows only for now, with goal of eventually on Xbox and PlayStation consoles.) I assume a lot of bugs have been stamped out in the past year, as it has been mostly smooth sailing in my play. It is tremendously fun even in its current incomplete state.

Hardspace:Shipbreaker was the subject of an episode of Unity’s “Behind the Game” podcast. Many aspects of developing this game were covered, and towards the end the developers touched on how DOTS helped them solve some of their performance problems. As covered in the episode, the nature of the game means they couldn’t use many of the tried-and-true performance tricks. Light sources move around, so they couldn’t pre-render lights and shadows. The ships break apart in unpredictable ways (especially when things start going wrong) there can be a wide variation in shapes and sizes of objects in the play area.

I love teardowns and taking things apart. I love science fiction. This game is a fictional world where we play a character that tears down spaceships for a living. It would be a stretch to call this game “realistic” but it does have its own set of realism-motivated rules. As players, we learn to work within the constraints set by these rules and devise plans to tear apart these retired ships. Do it safely so we don’t die. And do it fast because time is money!

This is a novel puzzle-solving game and I’m having a great time! If “Spaceship teardown puzzle game” sounds like fun, you’ll like it too. Highly recommended.

[Title image from Hardspace: Shipbreaker web site]