Разработчик: Q Switched Productions, LLC
Описание
Children of a Dead Earth is a simulation of true-to-life space warfare. Design your spacecrafts using real world technologies. Traverse the solar system using actual orbit mechanics. Command fleets as the solar system descends into war, and see if you have what it takes to become the victor.
Features
- REAL SCIENCE, REAL TECHNOLOGY - Every technology, from the Nuclear Thermal Rockets, to the Railguns, to the Magnetoplasmadynamic Thrusters, was implemented using actual equations from Engineering and Physics textbooks and white papers. Every aspect of these systems, efficiency, size, mass, power usage, heat dissipation, are all derived from valid equations.
- CAMPAIGN AND SANDBOX MODES - Assume the role of an admiral and fight through a detailed storyline chronicling the descent of the solar system into all out war, spanning every planet in the solar system and everything in between. Or simply play in the sandbox, designing ships and pitting them against other ships.
- EXTREMELY ACCURATE ORBITAL MECHANICS - With an N-Body Simulator (the kind NASA uses to plot spacecraft trajectories), all orbital phenomenon from hyperbolic orbits, Lagrange points, and orbital perturbation are all correctly simulated. Spacecrafts can stationkeep orbits, or enter into free falling perturbed orbits.
- 1:1 SCALE - The solar system is modeled completely to scale. The sizes of all planets, moons, and asteroids are accurately enormous, and the distance between them is similarly huge. The extremely high orbital speed of your ships deep in high gravity orbits is correspondingly correct.
- FREEFORM SHIP DESIGN - Build your spacecrafts out of rockets, propellant tanks, weapons, powerplants, radiators, and crew modules. Wrap it all up with multiple armor layers, and maybe a Whipple Shield to boot. The acceleration, moment of inertia, delta-v, and much more are all correctly calculated for all spacecrafts you design.
- HIGHLY GRANULAR MODULE DESIGN - Tweak everything from the nozzle length or stoichiometric mixture ratio of your bipropellant rockets to the armature and rail dimensions of your railguns. The results of every change is seen in real time, from the change in your rocket's exhaust velocity, to your railgun's inductance or muzzle velocity.
- PHYSICALLY ACCURATE MATERIAL PROPERTIES - All materials, chemical reactions, and spectra are physically correct. When your arclamp pumps your solid state laser, the pumping bands need to match up with the actual emission spectra of your excitation gas. When the photon absorption of a material is needed, it is derived from actual refractive index spectra data.
- IN-ENGINE MOD SUPPORT - The engine supports black box creation of untested or far future technology for modders to work with. All other game data, from levels to material properties, is also accessible to modders.
- STEAM WORKSHOP SUPPORT - Subscribe to mods on Steam Workshop, and they will automatically load. In-game export tools allow instant uploading of your own designs to Steam Workshop.
All of the above aspects combine to yield a space warfare simulator that is unparalleled in scientific realism. No other game combines the extremely accurate orbital mechanics, 1:1 scale of the solar system, and technology which is implemented 100% by scientific equations. If you ever wanted to know what space warfare would actually be like, this is the game for you.
Поддерживаемые языки: english
Системные требования
Windows
- OS *: Windows 7+
- Processor: Intel Core i5 @ 1.70 GHz processor
- Memory: 2 GB RAM
- Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 3000
- Storage: 200 MB available space
Mac
- OS: Mac OS X 10.7+
- Processor: Intel Core i5 @ 1.70 GHz processor
- Memory: 2 GB RAM
- Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 3000
- Storage: 200 MB available space
Отзывы пользователей
A great game that deserves more attention than it does, even if you want this game purely for the engineering aspect, it's definitely worth the price. The story does need work, especially where the faction you play as says things like 'Don't worry, we are not experiencing mass mutiny and this is not endemic to our military.' Things like this could revealed via enemy or allied transmissions during gameplay.
If still under active development, I would like a Lithium-Fluorine-Hydrogen triprop. option the combustion engine module. Furthermore, it would be cool if bimodal or even trimodal nuclear thermal rockets.
Overall a good game, some places need work.
can't run.
Space cool lol.
the most sci fi yet realist you can get, sadly its a bit too bare and bones and the learning curve is a steep if you don't know orbital mechanic
If you think you'd like this game then you're already part of its incredibly niche audience and it will scratch an itch that no other game will scratch. Recommend reading devlogs to understand what's going on under the hood bc the depth of the simulation here is not fronted to the player very well.
good game just ignore bugs and horrible optimization
ui is horrible but does whatever it needs to do
can spend hours designing and optimizing a single part
probably the best hard scifi game on steam, worth it on sale for 5 bucks
To me, this game is not about the game play, it is a fascinating reading material about a future space warfare technology. Most of the time i just read the in-game information and tried to understand how things works. I mean my old ignorant self was shocked when i realized the nuclear reactor and the crew module have a separate, different heat radiators. I was thinking they are on one coolant cycle, but irl in that case the reactor's few thousands kelvin heat would cook everyone in the crew module while the radiator tries to radiate the excessive heat. Irl the reactor and the crew module have to be separated because they have different optimal working temperature, also the radiators have to be a different material for better efficiency. Understanding this sucked me in into this world, i wanted to know more.
The game information just part of the full learning adventure, it is easy to find the dev blog about how things works, i spent countless hours reading them and the wikipedia for more info. Many things are way above my head, but most stuffs were understandable enough to blew my mind. Also i suggest to read the atomic rockets project rho website, a very informative, easy to understand website for hard scifi writers. If you are like me, you will waste a lot of time reading about fascinating space stuffs, but you will love every minute of it!
I took a look at custom lasers and gave up.
This game is more physics simulation than game and I wouldn't have it any other way.
Children of a Dead Earth is a game you buy to scratch an itch. It does that well, this is definitely the closest you can come to 'real' space combat in a video game right now (and probably for the foreseeable future). You get mostly real orbital mechanics, physics and engineering, plus a powerful and detailed editor that lets you play around with all of them. Unfortunately, that is pretty much all there is to it. The game was developed by one person as a side project, and you feel it while playing. The campaign is fun but nothing remarkable, and tbh you're fighting the controls and optimization just as much as the enemy during it. The AI also isn't that great. In general, the game could have benefitted from a lot more polish throughout, from fixing some odd missile behaviors to making the editor more accessible. I'm still recommending it though, because there is nothing quite like it, the game frequently goes on steep discount (less than 5 bucks at the time of writing and I got it for even less a while back) and if you're nerdy enough to even land on this page, you will probably get your moneys worth at that price.
It lacks both overall polish and content (it only has a bare-bones campaign that's pretty much a prolonged tutorial). Yet, it's a very interesting study on how realistic space warfare would actually look and play out, and can be at best lots of fun, at worst very educational.
Read the dev blog on all the research that has gone into it:
https://childrenofadeadearth.wordpress.com/
yes
Ok.... wall of text...
This is about actual physics, actual orbital mechanics, actual maths.
No, keep reading... :)
Maths is hard for many people.
I think a reason for this is that.... I dunno to give an example, we try to use the wrong parts of our brain to understand it. We are like... we see a page of maths and we try to read it with our methods for reading text. This is like trying to understand a painting by starting at the top left and going... green bit, yellow bit, red bit green bit... and trying to build up an understanding of the picture.
Possible, but really hard.
Maybe we saw a page of maths as a child and were overcome by wonder (I know I was), or we saw a film with some wild-haired scientist scribbling on a blackboard full of equations and having an epiphany and were inspired to dive into the joy of maths. The joyful bus of our wanting to get this new experience crashes into this sudden wall with a brain crunch, it hurts and we stop trying. It isn't by any means beyond us, but we are not finding a way in.
Trying to get the wonderful dance of orbital mechanics can be like this. This is why most space games appeal to people and why they are all dumbed-down, and for me, disappointing.
Something inspires us, a film, book or something, We maybe get some idea of what is going on with (real) space travel, the vastness, the wonder, the incredible... competence needed to navigate this stuff and we think this must be amazing... so we look for a space game.
Sigh.
My reference for comparison is Orbiter-sim (free open source - google it) - easily the best and for me most enjoyable space travel simulator around, but it took me literal months of banging my head and learning kepler's laws and trying and failing to plot orbital transfers yadda yadda, for some reason I was highly motivated to do this, so I broke through to the joy. Most people don't have the time or motivation to do this and thus will miss out on that particular joy.
Children of a Dead Earth manages to be a gateway into a non-dumbed-down enjoyment of orbital mechanics, and also be a kind of space-combat sim, that can claim some plausibility, or realism, and thus be immersive and engaging. Personally I wish it revealed more of its underlying mechanics, I want a cockpit and to be able to use a clicky MFD to plot courses based on numbers and so-on, but really that is for another game.
There is nothing else that even remotely tries to do what this game does, this game could be your gateway into the joys of realistic space combat/travel that is not dumbed-down, but is made more accessible to curious newcomers, through its approach to interface-design and game-ification of actual physics.
Well done. I heartily recommend this.
To add.
If you find you do like this, you may want to enjoy more, and more and more...
There are not many other things that scratch that itch, here is a short list of some that I have found, to get you started, maybe.
Martin Schweiger's Orbiter-sim (free and open source)
Flight of Nova - Excellent in development
Rogue System (unfortunately unfinished but worth a look)
Space Engine - More of a universe explorer but pretty good.
ReEntry - based on real life spacecraft.
I am going to enable comments for this review - these types of games are so rare, if anyone wants to add anything...
There ya go :)
KSP with guns
Literally if this game does not become widely recognized as the gold standard for hard sci-fi space warfare that it absolutely is, I will launch another 10,000 nukes in your general direction
11/10 radiators per laser
Great game, a little dated in some areas.
We violating the United Nations Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies with this one
laggy asf for gods sake reduce the splines on large orbits
Crappy bugridden performance oven; it's supposed to be hard sci-fi near future game, but it's more of technical demonstration of how to make the buggiest and least optimized software on earth. The game released 8 years ago and yet missiles and drone sometimes just randomly decide to not follow your orders or worst crash themsleves into a planet for no good reasons. The game regularly freezes even though it could run on a pentium II. Battles are completely RNG, and the only thing worth anything in this game, the editor, is locked until you beat half of the campaign, and 80 % of it to unlock it completely. I've wasted 4 hours on this scam and i'm not wasting more for the game to decide i can win after all, and be allowed to y'know actually play the game i purchased ? I recommend a hard pass on this game.
Engineering freedom, The end all be all of sci-fi for me. You can make a nuclear soup can to the Eiffel tower. Seriously this is a MUST HAVE for any hard sci-fi fans. Learning the game felt so natural in just the way you tinker with sliders and such. The developer of the game said that once he's done with "Mega Factory Titan" he will come back to this game. So to those who say that this is abandonware, I need you to eat the barrel of a coilgun. The optimization is quite rough however and if you click on a missile and watch it explode, The game will crash once all of the other missiles are disabled/destroyed too. As well as the game only allows you to have ten layers of armor which limits detailing, I fixed this with one mod that the community made.
Overall Amazing Game.
I'm left in awe and wonder at this game. The extent to which so many disparate scientifically accurate models could be implemented, and then intercompose them with one another with little defect, and then tie all this into a respectable 3d game with physically based rendering, is simply astounding. As a programmer, I aspire to create this kind of simulation. I lack the talent to create this kind of simulation. I wish the developers would open source their work just so I could learn from them.
Not to be outdone, the game does all this so it can show you something you couldn't ever see otherwise. There are far too many games out there that make rampant confident pronouncements about a cliche sci-fi trope called "space combat", all in the interest of creating gamified garbage for exploitable demographics, and yet they all fail at creating the one thing that would be truly interesting to see, which is the actual truth. But this game gets it. In the developer's own words, this game was not made to have fun, make money, or make a statement. It was created to *discover* what space combat would be, and to do so in the only way possible, which is to start from equations.
And despite all this, the game is playable, even thrilling. The mechanics are astonishingly well balanced, despite there never being an intent to make them that way. The overall feeling of playing the game is one of ruthless pragmatism, of cold hard calculations, desperate measures, cynicism, overkill, and spite. But it is also one of indomitable will, a never-say-die perseverance, and a curious optimism you get when you transition from a state of awfulness to a state where the problem is conquerable or solved.
That said, this is not a glowing review. There is a love-hate relationship going on with this game. I love the opportunity it provides to learn new things about the real world, to understand them deeply and intuitively, and to learn about them in a fun and low pressure way. I understand its user experience must be stripped down in the interest of focusing on the very sizable task that is simulating so many aspects of the real world. I understand that challenges in the game must be made difficult in the interest of its mission statement, which is to truly discover what space combat would be like, and there are times in a story where challenges must be presented to the player for narrative purposes. However this game has massive issues with its difficulty curve that goes far beyond these concerns.
I think anybody who ever finishes this game will remember the names of exactly two levels: "Vesta Overkill" and "Dusk Over Triton". They are excellent opportunities to develop some real understanding about what space combat would be, but I wish they would have stayed that way. I do not wish for these levels to be anything other than opportunities. I would have much rather gone through the entire campaign not ever having to deal with them, then play them as extra levels as part of a "scenario" mode that meant to go beyond the basics for advanced players. Or at the very least popup a tutorial window saying it's time to go through the ship/module editor, and don't forget to test it out in sandbox mode or else your turnaround time is going to make it impossible. It's odd that these aren't even end-game levels. These are just random levels interspersed throughout the main campaign, and the game gets dramatically easier before and after them. But I guess interspersing them this way makes the main campaign more palatable than having several nearly impossible levels back to back before you can see the ending, and the final two levels are actually quite a relaxing reward for beating "Dusk over Triton", sort of like a narrative denouement.
And if there is any saving grace to the difficulty, it is that this is the only game on its subject that's actually worth playing and winning. Winning here is not just some worthless pat on the back from game developers, it actually means you understand something about the real world that lots of people don't. The game's commitment to realism goes a long way towards making the time spent playing a worthy investment.
Engineering heaven. You don't even need a grasp of any of the concepts it deals with (but an understanding of orbital mechanics from something like KSP is recommended), you can just ask, "can I make this stock rocket better, and then 3 hours of messing with sliders later, you have an rocket that looks nothing like the original, and work way better.
First off this is Abandonware, and not really finished nor refined abandonware at that.... The first few missions are great with no bugs and a tutorial that is wonderfully easy to understand. Then there is the retaking ceres mission which throws all you learned into the incinerator. The entire trajectory map is bugged in this mission since it keeps on moving where the enemy fleet indicators are to inaccurate locations, which screws up the entire point of doing intricate maneuvers to do intercepts to the enemy. The entire mission relies upon abusing the enemy ai in a rather dumb way to drain their delta-v which may not work with the ridiculous amount of delta-v their tiny drones have, which makes it feel like the entire experience is a bug. If you think you would want to just ignore this mission mess around with the sandbox which is way more stable, the two parts of it is locked by this mission and another mission later on unless you use the unearned/cheap feeling "unlock all" button in the infolinks tab in the main menu.
Also, the sliders in this game in general are finicky to the point that you can just fling yourself out into deep space by moving a slider one millimeter on the screen, or it just doesn't register your input on the slider at all even though you moved it half a foot with your mouse IRL. So you just keep on swapping between trying to inch the mouse a bit at a time to do maneuvers, or redo your entire trajectory plan because there is no easy undo input button.
The UI scaling in this game is abysmal, with no settings to change it. The sun always looks like a black hole (as in extremely bright around the edges, but the center of it is blacked out/not visible) with how bad the bloom/lighting effect on it is. The graphics are bad or middling at best for it's time, especially compared to other indie games of it's time.
The in-combat move command is rather badly done since you are unsure how far you are pointing away from your ship to move it. Thus you could either move to the other side of the battle-space with no issue, or move a couple dozen feet.
Other then those massive issues and a few issues with ship building it is an okay hard sci-fi game that just does not work as it should. (the ship building issues is it does not handle thrusters in different locations other then the back of your ship, and the bad module customization UI along with you potentially being confused by if your modules are made correctly at all before testing them out.)
The one good thing besides the tutorial I can say about this game is that hard science based sci-fi is cool but that is just my opinion.
Good game. Got me into hard scifi
Siloship is opaf
But I love space jousting w/ nuke salvos
while the game is good, i cannot advise it as the dev abandoned it and never said anything about it four years ago
and the optimization is seriously lacking
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Дополнительная информация
| Разработчик | Q Switched Productions, LLC |
| Платформы | Windows, Mac |
| Ограничение возраста | Нет |
| Дата релиза | 27.01.2025 |
| Отзывы пользователей | 89% положительных (592) |