SS&T

From SSNTWiki

For information about the setting and lore of the project, see Frontier Universe

SS&T is a collection of Open Source algorithms developed to produce and graphically present a very rough estimation of behavior of solid object, fluids, fields and waves in vacuum. It is also growing to include a rudimentary GUI and AI system so it could serve, passably, as a game engine.

[edit] Components

A brief List of the Component of the SS&T Engine:

Editing tools

Most other modules are data driven. The developers found it very difficult to generate data file manually, thus various tools were created, most important of these was the ship editor and the collision file generator.

File Interfaces

It was realized that hard coding objects were bothersome even during testing. The file interfaces load effects resources, objects and GUI into memory during startup.

Vector support layer

Vector support layer handle a number of commonly used mathematical operation to reduce the load of the other layers

SS&T render core

The render core is based on code by Frank. D. Luna. It produces a presentation of the world state and the GUI.

Mass, Momentum and energy Balancer

The balancer handles Generation of interaction of items in the simulation world. The balancer encodes most basic physical laws and prevents their violation.

World State Iteration

Generate new world state from existing state and handle structural analysis of object clusters.

3D GUI

Receive inputs from a player

Unit AI

Manually controlling unit was confirmed impossible from various studies conducted by the developers. Unit AI system would allow players to issue intuitive commands without worrying about details for their execution.

[edit] Missing subsystems

A number of critical subsystems are missing from the engine, causing the simulation to frequently produce incorrect - or just very ugly results. The following is a list of missing subsystems:

Graphics:

Background

Atmosphere effects

Distant object effect

Dual Effects for fluid beams (only particle is implemented, missing billboard)

Bloom / glow

Bump map

Environmental map

Flare effect (muzzle, engines)

Physics:

High Speed optimization (Iterative collision)

Recursive structural analysis

Elastic Momentum transfer (collision)

Others

Rotational error estimator

Player class

Unit class

Networking code

It was pointed out that a number of systems may contain bugs or otherwise not operating as intended. This list includes almost every subsystem.

[edit] Current Objectives

The current objective of development is to simulate combat between two vehicles composed of more then 20 modules each.

--67.80.133.193 10:35, 7 February 2008 (CET)