This is the big one. The Acro Space Simulator — the project this whole devlog mostly exists to document — has its first public build, and you can fly it today.
What it is
A 1:1-scale space-flight and colony simulator. Not a skybox with a few waypoints — the actual Solar System, at true scale, running on real physics:
- Fly under patched-conic orbital mechanics, with RK4 6-DOF flight — your ship has real translation and rotation, integrated properly.
- Mine real elements from real bodies.
- Build colonies and infrastructure across the planets and moons.
Under the hood it's 23 bounded contexts and deterministic multiplayer — the kind of architecture that lets a simulation this large stay coherent and stay in sync across players.
The stack
It's Flutter for the app and UI shell, Dart for the simulation core, and GLSL for the rendering — the same Flutter-and-brand foundation the studio builds everything on, pushed about as far as it goes.
Determinism was the hard requirement. If the physics isn't deterministic, multiplayer doesn't work and nothing replays. Everything from the RK4 integrator to the bounded-context boundaries is in service of that.
Fly it
The build is on GitHub — HexaJohn/acro_space_simulator. Register an account here on the site and you can download the current build directly (free for early folks; more to come).
This is a beginning, not a finish line. Progress notes — orbital mechanics, colony systems, the netcode — will land here as I go. Come along.
Discussion
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