New Audio and Music EngineSun, 2 November 2025

Up until now there's been no in-game sound! So, that's obviously an area in need of more attention. And progress has been made...

It's hard to overstate just how important sound and music is to creating feelings and emotions in games, or any medium. To help me with that, I've built a node-based audio system of modular parts that plug together. It's purely code, but here's a diagram showing conceptually how it looks:

Audio Node Graph

It's essentially wired in a classic studio mixer set up, with audio devices feeding into a central mixer, and effect sends / returns mixing in various amounts of reverb etc, before the final mix output.

The audio devices are driven by a sequencer (more on that below).

This will let me do interesting things in-game, for music, and sound effects, like radio distortion effects, machinery, engines, random beeping, and vacuum muffling of all of it, even UI sounds.

I also plan to use the same system for radio message encoding / decoding - not in the game yet, but on the road map.

The synthesizer is modelled on a classic subtractive synth from the early 80's like a Juno-60 or Yamaha CS-80 (Vangelis), and I've borrowed a lot of my old SID chip code here which works very similarly.

• 5 Waveforms - Sine, Triangle, Sawtooth, Pulse (with pulse width modulation), and Noise (good for hisses of gas leaks and radio noise)
• ADSR (Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release) volume envelope.
• Filters - Low pass, and High pass (Butterworth) with variable cut off frequency and resonance.
• Filter envelope to sweep the cut off frequency over time.
• Analogue style CV & Gate split.
• Unique addressable polyphony (slide to different chords, polyphonic portamento!)
• Oversampling for reduced aliasing and maximum quality at high frequencies.

I've also build my own reverb unit. This actually incorporates some code I wrote for a prototype in 1998! Getting the parameters tuned is critical to a good sounding reverb, or it sounds like a million screaming demons escaping from hell through a metal tank.., so I leveraged the effort I'd already done and rewrote a new version using the same timing constants.

Here's a clip of the synth playing a few chords with the reverb.

I didn't have time to make a sampler in time for this dev log update, so just some spacey synth sounds for now, but that will be added later and extend the range of sounds dramatically.

On top the audio system, I've also built my own music sequencer.. which is text based and uses a compiler I wrote lol (I've got to have a least one of those in there somewhere!). This uses a custom scale-relative notation that I've always dreamt of to let me change key & scale quickly and have all the other tracks follow it. It should make it easier and quicker to explore the space of musical ideas

It's working well and I'm really quite pleased with it!  I just haven't had time to really use it properly yet, but I can flesh it out now and hopefully make some interesting instruments and music.

I think the tools you use really do shape what you make. Some of the best computer music ever made was by Rob Hubbard who used an assembler! It seems counter-intuitive, but in many ways text is easier to edit, cut & paste, layout how you prefer etc. You write more with your ears than your eyes.

It's also similar to what I used back then to make C64 music, just before trackers came along. So that was the initial inspiration for numerical input, but I've extended it with scale-relative notation, and also time-relative notes, so they can be moved together as a group, or even interleaved with previous notes for call-and-response etc.

I was also mindful of the creative transposing of Michel Geiss's sequencer on Jean-Michel Jarre's Equinoxe (Part 7) - if you know what I mean, you know! ;)

I've also added hot-swappable file editing so it's possible to edit the patterns while it's playing.

The pattern sequencer can also send any message to any of the devices, so it allows for complete automation of all dials and settings.

Should I be writing my own audio engine and music tools from scratch as well as the game? Probably not! But I did it anyway.. :P And now Starship Colony has powerful in-game audio machinery - it will find uses... everywhere!

As ever please wishlist Starship Colony on Steam:

Starship Colony on Steam

A deep starship colony sim. Build your starship, manage air, water, food, fuel, energy, temperature and psychology to keep your crew alive across vast distances. Closed-loop system in space. Mining, wiring, plumbing, in-ship factory, (alien?) radio signals & translation, diplomacy, combat, and more.

New Procedural Planet GenerationSat, 4 October 2025

We have a vast galaxy of stars, but we also need some planets and moons..

Here's my first attempt at an arid Mars-like planet, with various geographical regions - high rocky mountain planes, sandy dunes. In the lowlands, dark blue basalt volcanic rock beneath the dust.
In the polar regions are large white ice caps - also occasionally found elsewhere on high altitude peaks. These are a good source of water, not just for drinking but also for fuel & air (H2 and O2).

Procedural planet generation

There are also craters everywhere. Notice how they can punch through and displace the surface material revealing the layers below. There will likely be exotic deposits to mine here.

This is the view from space. When in orbit you'll be able to scan the surface and select your landing site. The surface terrain will reflect the kind of terrain you've chosen.

It's all completely procedurally generated at runtime! More planet types will be added in due course.

Here's a quick video showing the planet in rotation.
(Apologies for the YouTube compression - the original has finer details and richer colour.)

It's hard to overstate the amount of work that went into this update behind the scenes. My initially simple 2D sprite engine has grown into a full 3D engine at this point to support 3D planet meshes and 3D lighting alongside the core 2D game.

There's all sorts of knock-on effects when you can rotate the camera. A 2D background image won't work here and you need a sky box, so I've had to implement that too. It's extra work, but I think the improvement in quality and extra gameplay possibilities is worth it. :)

Big Engine UpgradeMon, 1 September 2025

This is just a quick update to let everyone know work is going well, and to talk about some changes.

It's been a choatic couple of months. I'm currently making some big changes behind the scenes to improve the look of the game - A major title just suddenly made themselves look a lot like us - so that's a big problem.

So I'm taking steps to put some daylight between us again. This extra work is going to delay the launch unfortunately, but the bright side is it should result in an even better game.

In hindsight it probably wasn't wise to reveal a lot of unreleased features years before release. From now on I'm reluctantly going to be keeping new features under wraps, at least until the trailer is ready.

Behind the scenes a lot is happening that I can't show off yet. The engine is getting some major extensions and upgrades to allow for some improved visuals. Some initial test prototypes of this look great! So I'm now confident enough to go ahead with the full engine overhaul.

There's a series of new features that go along with the upgrade, and I can't wait to show what I'm currently working on. You'll have to forgive the lack of screenshots, but the engine features being built right now will likely be generating a large portion of future screenshots! So stay tuned!

However, I'll give you a hint and show you a screenshot from something I made back in May...
May 2006 that is!... ;)

Planet generation from Totality Online (2006)

I'm planning to set up a mailing list soon that you can subscribe to for release news, and to get into early play tests. Check back for that.

In the meantime if you want to chat, we have a friendly Discord community that's growing nicely.

New Galaxy and Solar System MapSun, 1 June 2025

I've completely rewritten the galaxy map shown in the last update. It's now a core native part of the game rather than running as in-game software in a virtual machine. This has improved a number of things.

Firstly the resolution is now far higher, which is really needed for stars. The retro CRT effect was nice, but YouTube's compression can't handle it, and nobody wants smeary videos.

The galaxy image overlay is now drawn with the GPU and smooth filtered which improves the look of the galaxy gas & dust.

After some thought I've decided to remove the in-game software and virtual machines. They're taking too much of my time to maintain and I think there are better ways of doing the same things with plug-ins instead.

The previous version would cache the star data as files on a virtual disk for the virtual machine. If you pan around the galaxy you'd end up with hundreds of thousands of files on disk, and that's just one console in the game. At some point you have to save and load all this too. This was the point I realised I had to draw a line to the simulation depth and pull back a bit. There are better ways of doing all this.

So, the new version is completely native, and generates the stars procedurally on the fly. There are no files used, so nothing to save. It's faster and lightweight as it should be. I'm pleased with the improvement in quality.

For every star seen in the galaxy map, there's an entire solar system to be explored. I've just started work on the System Map to display these.

For testing I've used the real solar system, with real scales and distances. Though it's 2D the orbital data is real. We have proper semi-major axis distance, eccentricity, period, even the 'argument of periapsis'. I've also simulated proper Keplerian motion (where things speed up on closest approach). You can only see it on a time-lapse, but it's there!

The planets and moons are just coloured circles on the map for navigation purposes. They'll obviously have more detail in the main game view. I still have to add asteroids to the map, and integrate it with the galaxy map, but we're getting there! :)

Work Begins on the GalaxyFri, 9 May 2025

It's about time we had somewhere to go, so this month I spent time adding in a whole galaxy!

I wanted the galaxy to be realistic and impressive in size, not just a small puddle of dots, but something astronomically large and awe-inspiring. For me, the sheer scale of space, the huge quantities, and vast distances, are all part of the magic and the wonder, so I had to at least attempt it.

Galaxy Map. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC/Caltech)

So, I've used a real astronomically correct map of the galaxy - Credit to NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC/Caltech). The galaxy's arms are real and denote the highest density of stars, so I've used this to guide the procedural generation. You can see in the video below how closely it follows the map. And the Sun (Sol) is correctly positioned in the Orion arm.

Additionally, all the stars within 100 light years are real stars!  And they're correctly positioned in galactic space!  Yes, I had to get real star data and transform them from equatorial coordinates relative to Earth into galactic spherical coordinates, and then into galactic Cartesian coordinates used for the game.. I'll spare you the details of that adventure!

The data also needed some clean-up and filtering to remove double entries for binary star systems etc, and some name fixing. (Astronomers have the worst naming conventions! See the 'variable-star designation' naming system for ample bemusement).  I've also scaled the vertical dimension to make everything easier to see.  It's extra work, but now the galaxy is a real place, and it brings the fiction one step closer in your mind.

In the video the player clicks on the Navigator's console to open it up in a window.

The console is an in-game computer, that actually runs real in-game software you can modify while playing! In this case it's running AstroNav.bas which draws all the stars to the CRT screen, showing you where you are in the galaxy, and lets you look around and plot a course.

It's actually loading the star positions for each sector off disk files - this is *your* navigation data! As you explore beyond the known systems you'll add to it.

Each blue grid sector is 100 light years across. The minor grid lines mark 5 light years. You can also see a fuel radius circle. This is roughly how far you can get. At the moment this is just a placeholder, but when hooked-up to the network, should be able to ask the storage tanks how much they have.

You'll also be able to set a destination target, then the heading will be sent to the Pilot software which deals with realtime flight adjustments. It in turn will send network commands to the thrusters. You'll be free to modify all of this! - maybe make your own autopilot, or simply use someone else's (you don't need to code to play).

I suspect this in-game navigation software will change quite a bit over time, and become more polished. This is the very first version, and a proof-of-concept for in-game software in general. It's an area that sets Starship Colony apart from other colony sims. I'm excited by its power and potential to modify the function of every hardware item in the game in ways I haven't even thought of yet!  It's like Starship Colony's Redstone, but Basic is far easier to work with. It's a tinkerer's playground.

AstroNav Basic program that draws the stars

This is just the start. There's more to add to the galaxy - numerous factions of humans and... powerful things in the deep... :)

More Behaviours, Fire and Crew SchedulesWed, 2 April 2025

There's lots to cover this month - many new crew behaviours have been added:

All characters now have a basic 'Run To Safety' panic behaviour. If there's no air to breathe, or the temperature is extremely hot or cold, they'll run out of the room and find a safe place to stop. Fire also causes them to move away quickly! Something long overdue!

Related to that there's a new Temperature stat, and moodlets for being too hot or cold, or pleasantly warm.

I've also added Food, Drink, Toilet and Rest stats to all the crew. This is reflected into crew needs panel.

Eating updates the Food stat now. And they'll stop everything and go eat when extremely hungry, rather than just starving to death.

Likewise sleeping updates the Rest stat, and they'll stop everything and go to bed when extremely tired. And they automatically wake and get up when fully rested.

Food / drink / toilet / rest / hygiene depletes over time. A whole range of moodlets for these have been added. When stats go really low they start taking damage.

I've added toilet behaviour, including a stop everything and go to the toilet when the need is extreme. Yes, now your number 1 can do a number 2. :)

There's also washing behaviour. Added washing after toilet. Also added a stop everything and go wash when extremely dirty. Plus a new Hygiene stat to track this.

There's a new drinking behaviour - go to sink (or drinks machine), get glass of water, sit or stand drinking water. Added glass of water icon. Plus, you guessed it - a stop everything and drink when extremely thirsty behaviour too.

And finally I've add a pilot behaviour with operating the console as a sub-task. Now bridge crew will man their stations (all piloting for now).

Fire has had some attention too this month. Fire now has various sized flames, generates heat, spreads, consumes O2 and generates CO2. Fires will also go out when all the O2 is consumed.

I've also added fire-fighting behaviour - automatically triggered if they see it nearby. No longer will they sit idle doing the 'this is fine' meme. They will jump right to it! :)

Another large piece of the puzzle - the Crew Schedules interface was added, so you can now manage crew schedules for work, sleep, meals etc.

Of course for that to work, I had to also add Time. So there is now a date and time. I've also added a vertical line across the schedule showing the current time to make it easier to look up what each crew member should be doing right now.

Also numerous bugs were fixed, too many to list them all. Things like getting stuck on corners, or trying to breathe inside walls, trying to sit at a console when there's no air, trying to fight fire during a decompression. They now have a bit more common sense.

The whole update has added massively to the feel of the game. It's really coming together now. There're still many things to tweak and balance, but the basics of day-to-day crew life is now in and working. I'm very happy with progress :)

Character Skills, Needs and MoodletsSat, 1 March 2025

There's been a lot to fix after last month's big architectural change to allow for plug-ins. But I don't like going a month without something new to show, so I've also given the characters some much-need attention and added some new features:

• Character Skills - Variable, flexible, not limited to a fixed list, can be expanded.
• Character Needs - Colour-coded bars showing primary needs.
• Character Moodlets - Positive and negative to varying degrees, colour-coded for readability. Also flexible and expandable.
• Character Roles - Completely user-defined. It's your ship, your crew, your rules!

To go with that we have some new GUI panels to show all the new info. I've kept a layout familiar to players of other popular colony sim games.

At the bottom we have a character info panel that appears as you click on a character. It shows Name, Role, the Ship / Station they belong to, and Age.

In the middle is the main health bar you can't miss.

The current task the character is doing is shown below that, with the full task stack shown. So, in the context of say harvesting, it will show the general Harvesting behaviour, followed by the current sub-tasks such as walking to a plant location. More complex behaviours have more complex sub-tasks, which are displayed here. This is something I should have added much earlier as it's allowed me to debug a few problems now I can see what's going on more clearly. It should be useful for players to manage their crew in a similar way.

At the top of the panel, there's a couple of buttons that open up more detailed Skills and Needs panels.

On the Skills panel you can see skills listed with their level of expertise. Rather than have a standard fixed set of skills, I've decided to try something different and have the skills work like the moodlets. Just as in real life skills are numerous and varied, and most of us don't have our mining skills shown on our CVs, because mining is a niche activity like every other specialist skill. A single limited list of skills doesn't seem like a good fit for all eventualities. I thought about going back to more general D&D attributes like 'strength, dexterity and intelligence', but I like the idea of specialists in numerous fields, especially in a high-tech sci-fi setting like Starship Colony. Otherwise we'd end up with 'intelligence' being used to measure a character's ability in everything from astro-navigation to xeno-linguistics when clearly these are very different skills. And specialist skills allows for characters to become valuable in unique and interesting ways. In difficult situations you may have to make some tough choices about who to save, and good games are all about making interesting choices.

Lastly we also have some Background flavour text. I need more work here to flesh these out. I had to make a word-wrapping text box just for this. Just one of the million little things you have to do when you build everything including the engine yourself..

I also made a new colour bar control and put it to good use in the new Needs panel:

Here you can see colour-coded bars for the major needs. The bar is divided into regions, such as green, yellow and red you can see on the bottom edge of the bar. As the bar falls into each region it takes on the colour. I found this to be more visually appealing than splitting the main bar into segments which can get visually noisy. I'm still tweaking, but I think this design is cleaner and you can still see the critical areas to watch out for.

The big Happiness bar at the top right is the overall mood of the character. And you can see a breakdown of the smaller moodlets influencing the character below, and by how much positive or negative. Again there's lots to be fleshed out here, but I do like the flexibility a moodlet system offers. There's a lot we can do with this, yes, including 'Ate without a table'! I fear there might be riots if I didn't include that one. :)

To increase your happiness bar, please wishlist Starship Colony on Steam:

Starship Colony on Steam

A deep starship colony sim. Build your starship, manage air, water, food, fuel, energy, temperature and psychology to keep your crew alive across vast distances. Closed-loop system in space. Mining, wiring, plumbing, in-ship factory, (alien?) radio signals & translation, diplomacy, combat, and more.

New Plug-in System and ModdingFri, 31 January 2025

I've just completed a major update to the architecture of the game. We now have a plug-in system!

This allows in-game objects to be created completely independently of the main game code, then plugged-in at runtime. This means the game can handle new objects it's never seen before!  And that allows for modding! :)

I've migrated all the current built-in game objects to the new system as a 'Core' plug-in. This will always be loaded. This helps me prove the system and ensure it has all the functionality required by objects.

For example, the Electric Heater - it has custom code to check the temperature, produce heat if it's below a given temperature, consume power when it's on, and also draw different graphics frames based on this. All this can be achieved by communicating with the main game to interact with the various systems (such as heat, power, graphics drawing etc).

Another example is the Engine object - it has custom code to consume hydrogen and oxygen from its pipe inputs, accelerate the ship it's attached to, and render the thrust flame particles.

The game no longer needs to understand anything about electric heaters or engines or how they work - it only has to provide a method for the object plug-in to interact with the game, and they handle all the details themselves.

This helps keep the game code clean and separate from object specifics, and allows modders to make their own objects.

It's been a huge architectural change behind the scenes, and more difficult because it's happening after many objects have already been made. I've had to carefully plan the migration, and transition changes in stages to keep everything working. It felt a bit like trying to change a wheel on a moving car.

One major problem was the binary file format I was using. It's fast and efficient when you know exactly what data you're expecting, but now we have to load and save objects we've never seen before! So that needed to be completely rewritten, and I decided that a text based format would simply be easier to read and write, both for myself and for modders. In cases like this flexibility beats efficiency, though with some careful design, it turns out it's only fractionally slower than before and still takes only a few dozen milliseconds to save, so I'm happy with that.

There are still more areas I can plugin-ify, but all the difficult work has been done, so I can gradually open-up other areas of the game to modding in the future.

It's been hard work, and I'm pleased with the progress, even if it's not easy to show here, it should pay dividends in future.