barthpaleologue/cosmosjourneyer

Your next space adventure awaits in the web browser! CosmosJourneyer is an open-source procedural universe with seamless transitions between space and planet surfaces that makes space exploration accessible for everyone.

Cosmos Journeyer

Cosmos Journeyer is the procedural universe running inside a web page that makes space exploration accessible for everyone.

The main website of the project is online at https://cosmosjourneyer.com/

The main deployment of the procedural universe can be accessed https://barthpaleologue.github.io/CosmosJourneyer/

Documentation

The documentation is online at https://barthpaleologue.github.io/CosmosJourneyer/docs/

Additionally, the ARCHITECTURE.md file contains a big picture explanation of the architecture of the project.

To build it locally, run npm run docs and then npm run serve:docs to serve it at localhost:8081.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! There is too much to do for one person alone.

If you want to contribute, you will find guidelines and ideas here.

Sponsor

Developing Cosmos Journeyer is time-consuming and generates no revenue since it is free and open-source.

If you like the project, please consider sponsoring it on Patreon or [GitHub Sponsors](

The project has a ko-fi page at https://ko-fi.com/cosmosjourneyer if you feel like sponsoring the project!

Features

Every telluric planet and moon has a surface that can be explored by the player using a spaceship, or by foot!

Cosmos Journeyer allows to travel from one celestial body to another without any loading screen, giving the player a seamless experience while exploring.

Planet surfaces are filled with procedural vegetation and rocks and butterflies to make them feel more alive.

Cosmos Journeyer generates a virtually infinite amount of star systems that all have a star, often planets, and sometimes moons.

Build

First, clone the repository and install the dependencies with pnpm install.

Web

To build the web version of Cosmos Journeyer, run pnpm run build. Everything will be built in the dist folder.

Tauri

Cosmos Journeyer can be built as a desktop application using Tauri!

First you will need a bazillion dependencies, here is a list of some of them if you are using a Debian base OS:

sudo apt install -y libwebkit2gtk-4.0-dev libgtk-3-dev libsoup2.4-dev libjavascriptcoregtk-4.0-dev librsvg2-dev libwebkit2gtk-4.0-dev libappindicator3-dev patchelf

Then you can build the application with pnpm tauri build.

Contributors

Thank you to all the people who have contributed to Cosmos Journeyer!

Credits

All credits can be found in the credits panel of the game.

Special Thanks

• Martin Molli for his fearless refactoring of the messy code base in its early days
• The people from BabylonJS for their amazing work on the BabylonJS framework and their help on the forum

cosmosjourneyer's Issues

Update to Babylon 7

Make sure the project is compatible with the new major version of BabylonJS

I18n

Use i18n for all displayed text of the game

Enable HDR for all post-processes

Allow the output of post-processes to be larger than 1. Then put tone mapping in ColorCorrection instead of living in the LensFlarePostProcess

Planet materials: Use PBR instead of Blinn-Phong light model

Switch from the current Blinn-Phong implementation to a PBR one based on GGX for example.

Change materials to use BabylonJS lights instead of StellarObjects

This will be much more versatile and will reduce update complexity as there won't be necessary to pass StellarObjects at each frame

Make ship mouse control smoother

The transition between the dead and active zone is not very smooth. This could be improved.

Fix normal map orientations

Surface normals currently use the DirectX format while OpenGL is expected.

Fix axis and orbits not showing up when they should

Pressing the specified key does not make the orbits and axis show up.

Star map warp button cannot be clicked

Describe the bug

The warp button is not clickable after warping once to another system.

To Reproduce

Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Star a new journey
2. Warp to another system
3. Try to warp to yet another system

Expected behavior

The button should be clickable.

Fix readme build command

It should be pnpm run build

The throttle UI is confusing

see https://www.reddit.com/r/proceduralgeneration/comments/1b25vxk/cosmos_journeyer_the_infinite_universe_on_a_web/

The throttle UI should be simpler with a single percentage.

Project is deployed before the next release official tag

When moving the deployment branch to main, the auto deploy was still on, and now the 1.9 version is online while not being released!

Add notification system

The game has a hard time communicating what is happening on the screen. A notification system could improve that with some examples:

• Landing sequence initiated
• Landing sequence complete
• Engaging warp drive
• Disengaging warp drive
• Gravity well
• ...

Create basic economic backend

From each StarSystemModel, a StarSystemEconomyModel will be created. It will describe the type of economy: none if not inhabited, regular capitalist, communist and other variants will come with time. It will also describe the abondance of resources in the system (though this will probably its own component in the future).

The player will also be able to use money, different currencies in different regions of space. It will be carried through the save file. In this first basic iteration, money will be used to refuel the tanks of the spaceship. Later it will be used to add components to the spaceship (in a similar fashion to the landing computer).

Grass and butterflies render incorrectly to depth buffer

This can be fixed by following this solution:
https://forum.babylonjs.com/t/how-to-write-shadermaterial-to-depthrenderer/47227?u=crashmaster

Add sliders to control the sound volume

Add 2 sliders to the settings main menu's panel:

• One slider to control the volume of the music
• One slider to control the volume of sound effects

Add auto-save in `localStorage` every minute

Stringify the json content of the save file and put it in localStorage. Probably 20 should be enough.

Then the main menu load save section should be updated to display a list of known auto-saves.

The thruster plume kills the framerate

Even on high end hardware, the plume creates framerate drops. This sould not happen.

Fix WebGPU depth calculation

Post-processes using depth (like atmospheres) do not render properly under WebGPU:

This might be fixable using this new depth calculation: https://forum.babylonjs.com/t/clip-space-to-world-space-with-non-linear-reverse-depth-buffer-with-webgpu/48892/5

Space station rings do not respect relative position

The distance constraint is not respected when timestep and distances are big for some reason.

Automatically save on page exit

Download the current save file when the user exits the page.

Procedural space station names

Right now all space stations have the same name. This must change by using the seed of the station and a name generator similar to star system names.

Fix shadow post process duplicate display

The normal buffer could be used to remove the duplicate shadows of planets.

Flight assist is useless

Remove flight assist as it makes no difference and is confusing in the settings panel

WebGPU: make a minimal chunk forge that can create simple spheres

Write a WebGPU forge and the associated compute shader to generate a simple chunk with no elevation whatsoever. Just to prove that it can work.

Add multiple views when controlling the spaceship

Users would be able to use the numpad to switch between different views:

0. Default view from behind
1. View from the front
2. View the back of the left wing
3. View from the bottom
4. ... sky is the limit!

Add missing key bindings to the settings panel

Well it's hard for the user to guess the controls if they are not written somewhere.

WebGPU - Toggling orbits makes the renderer crash for the current camera after warping to a new system

This is probably caused by the orbit and axis renderer reset when warping to a new system.

Planet surface chunks offset issue

When on the surface of planets, this kind of visual bug appears:

Make settings panel accessible from pause menu

Not being able to check the controls while playing is an issue that must be fixed asap

Use HDR environment texture for starfield

Change starfield from being a custom post-process to being a true HDR environment texture.

Main challenge: how to convert a spherical texture to an HDR environment texture?

This would allow nice reflections on canopes and future telescope mirrors.

Add shadows on planet surfaces

Planetary shadows are already implemented.

This is about shadows cast by the spaceship, the character, trees and rocks.

Given the immense scales at play, probably use a fake DirectionalLight attached on the camera to generate cascaded shadow maps. The extent of the rendering volume will probably need to be hardcoded.

Fix telluric planet's surface memory consumption

Surface subdivision can be improved to reduce the number of needed vertices.

The main problem is that chunks are not destroyed enough, which creates a memory and rendering issue.

WebGPU - Fix crash when warping between systems

Warping to a new system crashes the WebGPU context when disposing some lighting effect.

Fixing this is required before moving toward a WebGPU only version

Create a Space station UI

As walking and exploring space stations is out of reach for now, interaction should be performed through a UI.

It will be done in HTML like the flight overlay because it will be complex.

It will feature options to buy refuel, take missions (trade and exploration in a first iteration) and view ship's components. A button to save the game could be interesting as well in the prospect of a survival mode in the future.

Hiding the UI will also be possible, in order to enjoy the view and capture awesome timelapses.

The UI should leave space for the view of the spaceship.