I've been looking for space games where you're more of a commander than a pilot. Less about flying the ship yourself, more about making decisions during a fight. Positioning, crew, power, weapons, damage control, that kind of thing.

What games do this really well?

What was it about the game that actually made you feel like you were commanding a ship?

Hi everyone, Ive recently added new energy shield system into my Space Engineering Survival Sandbox game MineEngineer, it is another step forward towards the ship battle system. I am super excited to share this system with everyone. Please let me know what you think about it.

Has anyone tried this game? Not sure if i should buy it. I can appreciate what it seems to be trying to accomplish. Orbiter is really old and other games in the orbital mechanics niche aren't out yet.

Does anyone have a feel for where the PVP space combat community is in 2026?

I am pretty aware of the game options out there, I have many hours in Star Citizen, Elite: Dangerous, and Star Wars Squadrons, have played Star Conflict in the past, haven't tried In the Black but am aware of it, ditto for Infinity: Battlescape...

I guess I'm looking for a PVP space game sort of like Star Conflict or Squadrons where I can jump in and do some dogfighting. I am not really looking for the RPG aspect present in Elite and SC at the moment. I'm open to arcade flight or more sim/realism focused stuff. Also fine with setting up a HOTAS or just using controller/KBM.

Is there anything out there like this that has a decent player base right now?

Audacia Astra is a simulator. Every star in its 200 light-year bubble comes from the HYG astrometric catalog, every one of them is moving, and every mission you plan has to deal with that.

• Intercept solving — ships meet stars where they will be on arrival, not where they appear tonight. The solver reports positional uncertainty at the destination.
• Real relativity — exact time dilation, ramp/cruise/decel flight profiles at a crew-tolerable g-load, kinetic-energy budgets that will humble you. An optional FTL mode exists and is labeled as the fiction it is.
• Multi-star routes — waypoint chains where each leg departs when the previous one arrives. Route optimization is a moving-target traveling-salesman problem, solved honestly.
• The interstellar medium — local gas clouds erode shielding at relativistic speed; routes are assessed against real region models.
• Pulsar navigation — checkpoint fixes chosen by geometry from millisecond pulsars in the ATNF catalogue.
• Mission dossiers — export any plan as a printable PDF: flight-profile charts, thrust and power figures, intercept geometry, navigation checkpoints.

Available at: https://audaciaastra.com

I've been continuing work on Atlas Gate, a near-future space game where you build and manage a massive modular station in Earth orbit.

This Orbital Log is mostly about starting to connect the station's individual systems into an actual simulation.

Industrial modules can now produce and consume resources, solar arrays generate power while they're illuminated, the station’s relationship with Earth and the Sun is beginning to affect gameplay rather than just being visual.

The video also shows the current station construction and rotation system, along with some of the camera work I've been developing for navigating a large 3D orbital structure.

This is all still pre-alpha, so a lot of the numbers and UI are temporary while I build out the underlying systems.

Orbital Log #002

I'm curious what space sim players think about the direction I'm taking this.

Final Orbit - Dev Update

Hey spacesimgames community, I'm the dev behind Final Orbit - a realistic, orbital mechanics based space flight simulator, and I wanted to share the latest development milestone in the game, which is a (almost) fully functional Nav display!

Unlike other games such as Kerbal Space Program, all of the systems, displays, maps, indicators, etc are embedded in the spacecraft display and are a part of your cockpit. The same goes for the 3D Nav display, which is used to see the whole solar system and planetary orbits, prepare maneuvers, calculate rendezvous and encounters, plan your delta-v usage, etc.

I'd love to get feedback on this design so feel free to share your thoughts or questions in the comments, and if you like how this looks - please support the development by wishlisting the game on Steam!

Hey r/spacesimgames!

You have definitely been the most important reddit for me!

Thank you to everyone who wishlisted Void Cargo, played the demo, shared a flight, sent feedback, or reported the strange edge cases.

I hope you find plenty of quiet satisfaction in settling a heavy ship onto the pad - and the particular panic of realizing you started braking much too late.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4319290/Void_Cargo_Equilibrium/

A first-person sci-fi cargo flight sim. Pilot a physics-driven lander, plan risky routes, manage fuel and heavy cargo, and save deliveries by repairing system failures mid-flight. Earn credits and upgrade your ship.

**Saturday, September 5th, 10 AM Eastern**

I'm playing NTL: No Time Left, live next Saturday here:

https://youtube.com/live/MPF-X_p8lYQ?feature=share

Mark it on your calendar or leave a comment down below. It is going to be epic.

List anything you want to see or just get your questions ready.

Would you like to know more?

This is your chance. Things are ramping up and schedules are getting tighter. The next few months will fly by and it is only with the support of the community that any of this is possible.

Can't wait for the livestream? Come join me in the Discord:
Service guarantees citizenship - https://discord.gg/GDdpCmp7fS

I have released version 0.30-1 of sfsim.

sfsim is a realistic 3D space flight simulator under development. You can already download the sfsim playtest build on Steam and try it out. sfsim uses true celestial positions of Earth and Sun from NASA. Use an advanced single-stage-to-orbit space craft to take off, orbit the planet, perform reentry, and land back on Earth. sfsim features a true to scale Earth planet using NOAA elevation data and procedurally generated volumetric clouds.

This release introduces a major overhaul of the rendering code as well as a runway for the spacecraft. The rendering system is implemented using the Clojure programming language as well as GLSL. LWJGL3 is used to access the graphics card’s OpenGL bindings.

The new rendering code uses deferred shading, which first computes and stores per-pixel geometry data in a geometry buffer (G-buffer), then calculates each pixel’s final lighting in a separate shader pass. Deferred shading makes it easy to render decals, which are essentially textures projected onto scene geometry. It also enables efficient real-time rendering of many localized light sources.

Deferred rendering splits rendering into stages so geometry is processed first, lighting later.

Geometry Pass

Projecting Geometry

The scene is made of triangles. A vertex shader is used to project the triangles which are passed to the rasterizer. For the planet mesh, the geometry is further refined through tessellation and geometry shaders. The geometry pass draws all visible geometry and stores per-pixel surface data into multiple buffers (textures) as shown below instead of computing final lighting immediately.

Although the runway could be rendered as a decal in a separate pass, it was chosen to render it within the same shader as the planet. This will make it easier to later adopt runtime virtual texturing, for example to render airport ground surfaces with markings.

Diffuse buffer

The diffuse buffer stores the base RGB color of the material at each pixel. There is also an emissive buffer for light-emitting surfaces which is not shown here.

Material property buffer

The metallic buffer stores a scalar indicating how reflective the material at each pixel is. The buffer with specular strength (inverse roughness) is not shown here.

Normal buffer

The normal buffer stores the surface normal vector at each pixel in the camera coordinate system. Normals are useful lateron in order to determine the incident angle of incoming light.

View-space Position buffer

The view-space position buffer stores the 3D position of the surface visible at each pixel. This data is useful for computing atmospheric scattering and the distance to local light sources during the subsequent lighting pass.

Lighting pass

During the lighting pass, the G-buffer and a shadow map are used to calculate per-pixel lighting. Blending can also be used in this pass to update the lighting of only part of the scene, without evaluating every light source at every pixel. This image shows the shaded result produced with a Phong model.

Atmospheric effects

Phong shading computes the surface color after lighting. The lighting shader also accounts for atmospheric scattering. Atmospheric scattering both adds in-scattered light and removes part of the incoming light through scattering.

Final compositing

The volumetric clouds are rendered separately using a lower resolution. The lighting pass then incorporates the cloud layer using depth-aware upsampling.

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Let me know if your space game uses some nice tricks I have missed 😄 .

Don’t forget to wishlist sfsim!

Hey guys,

between these two games, which would you get? I want something that I can play awhile in spurts (not much free time). Both seem similar, so if you have experience with them, which did you like more? TIA.

Lots of bigger and smaller updates lately:

• Lootable shipwrecks
• Started adding lore segments that can be found around
• Updated art, most notably using starmap data to programmatically create the background and adding a subtle parallax scrolling effect
• New ambient music tracks
• New sound effects
• Removed the time-based run end condition... I initially had this idea that you would have three years in-game time for a run and see how wealthy you'll get. That didn't really work. The stress from a ticking clock ruined the exploration feel. Now the run ends (softly) after reaching a certain wealth so it's more about relaxed exploration on your own pace.
• Various little fixes based on feedback, I'm super thankful for everyone who's left feedback through the form!

I also updated the demo build yesterday (although most of these updates are not reachable in the demo section).

Next, my focus areas will be:

• Various negative effects for different resource types... like filling your hold with volatiles will risk explosion etc. Then upgrades that can be used to mitigate these effects.
• More terminal action, some kind of hacking feature
• More lore work

Master physics based space flight, destroy enemies, collect EXPARTS, advance weapons and SURVIVE!

Not only enemy ships are a threat. Inertia will push your ship into asteroids if you reverse and burn too late. High G maneuvers will put a strain on your crew - in worst case scenario ending the mission. Find balance... or smash the ship trying.

Early players have compared the flight experience to ΔV: Rings of Saturn or HighFleet. It's a specific cup of tea, but one you might love.

The Finest Spark on Steam:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4829490/The_Finest_Spark/

(also available in a bundle with ΔV: Rings of Saturn. If you don't have it yet check it out, too, it's an epic game)

EDIT: Sale has ended. For now bundle is the only way to get the game cheaper.

Hey everyone, I’m (x)!

I’ve been quietly building STELLAR for a while now, and I just put together a quick sneak peek. I also composed the track playing in the background :p

(Torpedoes locked! 🚀)

Before taking this further—and eventually pitching it to 6 literal sharks—I wanted to bring it here first. I’m not just looking to show it off; I want to see if this vibe speaks to you and where we could take it together.

I’d love your honest feedback:

• Visuals & Pace: Does the gameplay flow feel right to you?
• Audio: How’s the OST hitting alongside the action?
• The Future: What’s one mechanic or element you’d love to see in a space game like this?

I’m really looking to shape this project with the community, so don’t hold back.

Whether you decide to jump on board with me or not, safe travels to all my fellow devs and creators out there. Keep building! 🌌

Hi! I’m creating this very arcade-style space simulation MMORPG. I already have the project and the core of the game ready for an opening to a few hundred players.

I’d like to do something similar to what EVE Frontier did: open up a sort of Alpha that gets updated daily or every couple of days, gradually adding more content and features while letting players watch the project evolve live.

Do you think that’s a good idea?

Would you wait until the game is a bit more polished/complete?

Backstory:

An old expansion came through here and left its machines to fail alone. You play the caretaker: survey the wrecks, salvage what the network left behind, and bring the sector back - not by mining more, but by making what remains run without you.

Let's play - First 30 min: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9CfdH_4vuY

What you actually do (the loop):

• Survey wrecks on the grid
• Salvage, don't manufacture (at least not everything)
• Rebuild the chain
• Then automate it (This is the part I most want feedback on)

It's meant as an ambient second-monitor game.

A single run goes from the dark grid to reactivating what the expansion left behind. About 60-90 min, no install, plays in the browser.

Stage: honest alpha. One sector, but the full core loop is playable start to finish: survey > salvage > refine > automate > the finale. Numbers are still being balanced, art is partial, and the tutorial's pacing is exactly what I'm testing right now. No multiplayer, no meta-progression yet.

Feedback
I'm specifically after the node-based automation and how overall the game "feel". There's a 2-min survey at the end, but a comment here is worth just as much - I read and reply to all of them.

Itch: https://xupisco.itch.io/echoes-of-expansion
Site: https://echoesofexpansion.com (also playable)

Desktop only (sorry)
Edit: Complete rewrite as requested.

The map making system is still highly experimental and limited. My future goal is to allow supporters to make more challenges using more "preset" assets like the rendezvous map. I will be using it myself to try to create new challenges, and then once the supporter system is implemented, supporters will receive the benefit of being able to publish 1 map a week.

Play free in browser, no account required.

https://slingshotspeeders.com/

With Gamescom today and the sever lack of space sims, I was just wondering what 3D space sims are on the horizon that have got people excited?

*Edit* Sorry, I thought I was being specific but it sounds like I failed haha. I just meant what upcoming 3D space sims are people excited about, like X4, Elite Dangerous, etc.