Baby, The Stars Shine Bright
Mar. 11th, 2005 11:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alfvaenAfter running across a reference to it on Wikipedia, I've started playing Noctis. It sounds like the kind of game I'd really like--you explore the galaxy, discovering new stars and planets, and naming them. No hostile aliens, no dangers to speak of. Quite frankly, I like naming things more than I like fighting. On the other hand, the interface(which is first-person, designed to resemble the inside of the space suit with a heads-up display)took a bit of getting used to, though I think I've figured it out now. And I managed to find an unnamed Earthlike planet, too.
You can share your database with a community of other players, though you can't have duplicate names. There's thousands of stars, at least, in the database, so it doesn't look like there'll be too much competition. It's a DOS program, still, but apparently there is a newer version in the works.
One arbitrary restriction on naming is that you're not allowed to name stars and planets over stars and planets in our galaxy. Because you don't play a human character, and you're not in our galaxy. However, there's no restriction on naming stars and planets after, say, countries on Earth, or characters from Tolkien, despite the unlikelihood of Tolkien making it to another galaxy, even in translation. But whatever. (Maybe it would be okay to have a planet named Rigel orbiting the star Jupiter?)
Still, I am, of course, at no loss for names. The Earthlike planet I found is actually Maricela, a moon of the gas giant Luba orbiting the star Palomar.
Oh, and you can actually land on the planets. Many of them are dead boring, of course, but some of them have quartz surfaces which are quite pretty--probably generated fractally and tiled in triangles. When I landed on the Earthlike one, it was raining(with lightning, though no thunder because there's no sound in the game), and there were definitely trees. Apparently there's animal life somewhere around, too. Should be fun.
You can share your database with a community of other players, though you can't have duplicate names. There's thousands of stars, at least, in the database, so it doesn't look like there'll be too much competition. It's a DOS program, still, but apparently there is a newer version in the works.
One arbitrary restriction on naming is that you're not allowed to name stars and planets over stars and planets in our galaxy. Because you don't play a human character, and you're not in our galaxy. However, there's no restriction on naming stars and planets after, say, countries on Earth, or characters from Tolkien, despite the unlikelihood of Tolkien making it to another galaxy, even in translation. But whatever. (Maybe it would be okay to have a planet named Rigel orbiting the star Jupiter?)
Still, I am, of course, at no loss for names. The Earthlike planet I found is actually Maricela, a moon of the gas giant Luba orbiting the star Palomar.
Oh, and you can actually land on the planets. Many of them are dead boring, of course, but some of them have quartz surfaces which are quite pretty--probably generated fractally and tiled in triangles. When I landed on the Earthlike one, it was raining(with lightning, though no thunder because there's no sound in the game), and there were definitely trees. Apparently there's animal life somewhere around, too. Should be fun.
