waltdestler

I've looked into all of those things in the past:

- Making C#/.NET floating point deterministic across x86/x64 is not possible, there's no way for force the JIT to output a specific instruction set.

- Client/server with prediction works for games that have relatively low numbers of objects that need to be synced (i.e. most first-person shooters). It doesn't work well when a game has thousands (or in Cosmoteer's case, tens of thousands) of individual objects that need to be synced, the bandwidth and CPU costs of keeping those synced is astronomical. Originally that's how Cosmoteer's multiplayer used to work, and it was a disaster, plus the code to keep everything in sync was insanely complicated.

- Switching to fixed-point is the only remotely-viable option you suggest, and I've strongly considered it in the past. But it'd be a huge amount of work to port all of the floating-point code to fixed-point, and there would likely be a significant performance loss in doing so. Since 32-bit users are only about 2% of all Steam users, I think it's not worth doing.

Crew have AI in Cosmoteer but it's not emergent like Dwarf Fortress is. Cosmoteer's AI is deliberately predictable so that you can use your knowledge and customization of how the AI will behave to optimize your ship's design.

That's intentional, I don't have much to hide. ;) I regularly point people to the cosmoteer.net/downloads directory.

Hey, Cosmoteer dev here, I just want to give a quick explanation of why the game is currently Windows-only: Originally I tried making the game in Unity but ran into major performance problems with that engine, so I switched to my own engine (there weren't really any other options like Unreal available at the time). But because I'm only a solo developer and I do all my own programming, art, sound, and game design, my time is very limited, so I chose to concentrate only on one platform. (And obviously Windows is by far the largest market for PC games.) I do hope to support other platforms eventually, but I can't promise that and it will probably only happen if Cosmoteer is commercially successful enough on Windows to warrant the investment in other platforms.

Thanks to you all for encouraging me to sell it now. I honestly don't think I can do that yet given the bare-bones state of the singleplayer campaign. I think there would be a significant portion of negative reviews complaining about that.

Cosmoteer relies on deterministic floating point calculations to keep the multiplayer simulation in sync between computers. Cosmoteer is also written in C#/.NET, which uses SSE instructions for 64-bit and FPU instructions for 32-bit, which can produce slightly different results.

You can have multiple ships in Cosmoteer, but yes, the focus is on smaller fleets than GSB.

Hey, I'm the dev, and I agree 100% with your criticism! Yes, the singleplayer is very barebones right now, and more content is coming, including a totally reimagined singleplayer campaign mode.

Hey, I'm the dev of Cosmoteer. I can confirm you are correct, I'm trying to get feedback, bug reports, and to build a community before switching to paid. In the meantime, thanks for playing!

Sorry about that, my poor webserver wasn't expecting this kind of traffic. :/

If you can't download the standalone version, try downloading the "demo" on Steam, which despite being called a demo is really just the same version as the standalone.

Hey, I'm the dev, thanks for your kind words! You probably caught me at a good moment before the lack of sleep and standing all day caught up to me. ;)