My name’s Mygas (pronounced My-gus) and I recently was invited to join this cool looking project by tjwhale. To be honest, I’m a bit overwhelmed by the amount of information already available on the project and am having a bit of trouble identifying what the first thing I can work on really is. Until I can really dig into absorbing everything I’m hoping this introduction will give enough of my background that some other team member’s might suggest a specific area to start looking.
I currently work as a Senior Systems Engineer in the avionics industry; coordinating and developing safety critical software products. I’ve got experience in Ada, C, C++, and Java, as well as a number of scripting languages. Probably half of my day-to-day job is project management (a critical component of our industry), and the other half is design and development, so from these areas I may be able to support the Programming team or the Project Management team.
My college background is in Aerospace engineering with a specialization in propulsion as well as a minor in mathematics. From what I’ve read, Thrive will eventually have a space-faring portion of game-play; something I feel I’ll be able to help tremulously on when we get there. (e.g. Orbital mechanics, propulsion system design, etc.) For the current stage of gameplay, I may be able to help in areas of fluid dynamics (air, my background, is just another fluid as far as the theory is concerned) or structural mechanics, though I have a feeling there’s not a lot of these in the microbe stage. Obviously this background lends itself to the Theory team.
In general, I’m a pretty ambitious type of person and really work (and hobby) to solve challenging problems regardless of the discipline they’re in. If I don’t have a good background of the topic; I have a tendency to go obtain it so I can solve the problems. So really this lends itself to any team, if you need a fresh perspective on something you’re doing (unless it’s art; I’m colorblind ) or need some additional people to tackle an existing problem I can be available to help out.
Not much else I can think of for the moment; hoping to get a development environment setup in the next day or so and then start getting familiar with various areas of the project. In the meantime feel free to reply, PM, or Slack DM me if you have any questions, or have an idea for a problem you’d like me to go solve.
Fluid mechanics has already been taken by @TheCreator (though you’re always free to help with, say, optimization or something), and we’re doing something relatively simple there, simply using curl noise (ie curl of smooth scalar noise) for nice-looking vortices.
Several of us lend a lot of our time to prototyping, you could do the same. The membrane developed out of a few prototypes, the fluid dynamics is doing the same, and we have prototypes (in various stages of development) on stuff like orbital dynamics.
If you want to work on prototyping, and are interested in doing some orbital dynamics, you could have a look at the prototype that @tjwhale and I were working on some months ago. The code is here, albeit rather messy (epicycles describes some math and design, epicycles2 displays some motion, and I’m not even sure what stars does). We essentially decided to try and make a system with hill spheres and lagrange points to allow us to represent complicated transfer orbits as tree traversals, which leads to an easy approximation of minimum ΔV for a particular transfer. Thing is, we never managed to crack the relationship between travel time and ΔV, and actually trace out paths in space and not in abstract ‘energy level’. It’s a bunch of lagrangians and perturbation theory, so maybe you’d be interested.
The motivation behind the prototype was that we want an orbital dynamics model that’s able to model the realities of interplanetary logistics – so unlike, say, in KSP, where orbital trajectories are simulated in space, we want to model the network of possible trajectories so we can navigate that network and indirectly move things through real space, allowing us to calculate the economic costs involved in, say, an asteroid mining operation.
If that doesn’t tickle your fancy I can try and find something else
We also have lots of features to implement in-game for upcoming releases, if that’s more your thing.
Something I have been looking at recently is aquatic locomotion, which might be something that suits you. Swimming Efficiency
Basically we want to make an editor where you can design the skeleton and musculature of your ocean creature and then procedurally skin it and then have it swim around. We’ve done quite a lot of work on skinning so that’s pretty doable but we’re not so sure how to handle converting “tail moves like this because of muscles” into “fish moves like this with this drag and this energy efficiency.” That might interest you.
) or need some additional people to tackle an existing problem I can be available to help out.