Forward, always up the screen (dev.35)​

The direction of travel used to point straight up from the deck, which meant the view ahead and the deck you walk on could not share a frame. Now the ship flies bow first, and the decks stay level under the generator's 1 g. The Bow view looks forward over the rail from behind and above the captain. It slides as you walk but never turns, so W always walks up the screen and the starbow always sits ahead. Press 9 to look Astern, and 7 or R to come back. Using a console zooms in on it, still looking forward. Props that would block the view, such as the spire or the lift, fade out of the way.

At a stop, the ship turns itself rather than the camera. The body you've reached sits about 30° off the bow, inside the same view, from every spot on the bridge we measured. No physics changed: the relativity package already took the direction of travel as its one axis, and the sky is still the same live render, checked against the CPU reference in the GPU golden cases.

The bridge faces the bow (dev.35)​

The old bridge was laid out for the old camera: three of its four stations had you facing the stern or sideways. A probe that looks through the real Bow and Astern cameras at nearly 4,800 positions on the deck now scores every layout. The new one puts the navigation pods at the bow rail with the captain's chair behind them and the Voyage and Crew consoles either side. You start behind the helm with a clear walk ahead. Every station faces forward, and every console close-up looks out at the sky ahead.

The pods and chair have a first painted finish: shading where surfaces meet, ink at the creases and an ink outline. In deep space the bridge is lit by a warm light on the spire. Near a star, its real light takes over: direction, colour and Doppler shift come from the simulation. The handover is gradual.

Each navigation pod now has a brass-framed screen on the side facing the captain.

Home in sixteen steps (dev.34)​

The crossing review's Home page now has sixteen steps of time away instead of seven, with more than one picture for many of them, chosen per voyage. The pictures for up to a few thousand years are on the concept art page.

What's new​

• Travel toward the bow, a fixed Bow view that slides and never turns, Astern on 9, and stops that turn the ship to the body (#282, #286).
• The bridge rearranged to face the bow, scored through the real cameras (#287).
• Painted navigation pods and captain's chair, operator-side screens, and the spire as the bridge's own light (#290).
• Sixteen home-time steps with picture variants on the crossing review's Home page (dev.34).
• Pull requests now run a fast check tier on GitHub; the full suite runs on the build machine before merge.

Not yet​

• The rest of the bridge props in the painted finish, and a wider styling pass over the whole bridge and its on-screen graphics.
• Views for the Commons and the other levels, each with its own fixed views and set dressing.

Releases: v0.4.0-dev.34-home-tiers, v0.4.0-dev.35-bow-view

The crossing, reviewed (dev.32)​

A long cruise is crossed in chunks the simulation publishes. A crew hold stops the crossing on the day it happens. Before arrival braking the ship pauses on a review: the crossing itself, home, aboard, the moments that mattered, who changed, the medium you flew through, and who is waiting for you. Every number comes from the simulation's cruise digest. Nothing times out; you read on when you're ready, and you can look around the bridge while it's open.

The Home page shows a picture of home that changes with how long you've been gone. All seven pictures are on the concept art page.

The crew on the videocom (dev.33)​

The Crew console is now a two-panel internal videocom. The crew member is large on the left, at the emotion the simulation gives them, with their words. On the right are the work and the actions you can take next. If someone raises a concern, Start is greyed out and says why until you answer: make the job clearer, ask their advice, explain why it matters, or insist. Asking or ordering is chosen right there on each offer.

A roster board puts whose move it is first. Colour-coded chips show who is waiting on you (amber), who is working (green) and who is free. The colours are checked for colour-blind separation. Crew can now ask to stand down at a duty check-in (crew_core 0.6), and generated names now suit each portrait.

A camera that follows you (dev.33)​

There is no more free zoom or mouse look. The camera follows the captain from three fixed levels: Close, Deck (the default) and Whole level, chosen with 1/2/3 or one scroll or pinch per level. Its angles are authored around the bridge so the captain stays in view.

Under way the camera turns to Sky forward by default and looks past the captain at the starbow gathering ahead. At a guided stop it turns to the side to show the body you've reached. At Sagittarius A* it frames the hole itself:

The physics is unchanged. New GPU-against-CPU golden cases check that the sky seen through the new views matches the reference.

What's new​

• The crossing review replaces the six-second interlude card (#264).
• Crew offers get an answer while the guided tour is paused (#263).
• The Crew console becomes a videocom, with stand-downs and names that fit faces (#267).
• A fixed third-person camera with sky views, including the black-hole view (#270).
• Hold I to see faint guides for Orion, Cassiopeia, Crux and the Big Dipper (#271).
• AILANG v0.54.14, with every downstream workaround for its VM removed (#262).

Not yet​

• Bridge furniture and sightlines rearranged for the new fixed views.
• The wider population aboard, of which these five crew are the voices you know.

Releases: v0.4.0-dev.32-crossing-review, v0.4.0-dev.33-fixed-camera

Update, 15 October: the crew merged to main (PR #224), and dev.29 adds the Crew console with work cards.

Meet the crew​

Walk to the Voyage console on the bridge and press E. Below the guided voyage is the Crew: a medic, a chief engineer, an analyst, a pilot and a counselor. Their names are new each voyage, drawn from a long list of names from around the world, so no two crews are quite alike.

Each row shows how they are doing: stress, fatigue and their trust in you. A bar turns warm when someone is overextended. There are no scores and no numbers to optimise, only people.

Asking, not just ordering​

Offer work asks a crew member to take something on, and they answer at once, in character. They may agree, decline, raise a concern or ask for relief. Their answer comes from who they are and how they are doing, never from a dice roll you can redo. Every answer is final and goes into the record.

You choose how the ship is run:

• Consent: work starts only once the person has agreed. This is how every voyage begins.
• Orders: you can start work regardless. People comply, but trust pays for it, more for some personalities than others.

Switching between the two is a deliberate choice: the button asks you to confirm.

Long legs: auto-run and crew holds​

On a long cruise the crew run themselves under standing orders, checking in once a month far from stars and every day near them. You don't have to manage every hour of a decade-long leg.

When something matters, the voyage stops and the console tells you: someone is close to breaking down, trust has fallen too far, a refusal under orders, an argument over what the ship lost, or news from home that the whole ship heard. Ship time waits until you have dealt with it and resumed. Choose Hands on to be called more often, Critical moments only (the default), or Off to make every decision yourself.

Their own words​

What each person decides is settled by the ship's simulation. With AI switched on and your own key, they can also put it in their own words, in character. A reply that slips into the ship's internal bookkeeping is refused, and a plain line stands in. With AI off, nothing is sent anywhere and you still see every answer.

The physics reaches them​

The crew share the ship's real limits. Heat, signal windows, mass and power are the same resources the ship tracks, at their scale. A close pass of a black hole loads the radiators. News from Earth opens the antenna windows. A burst that carries a death reaches everyone. The drive's mass bill for a leg is told to them at departure.

This is the first slice of the crew. Next comes the wider population of around a thousand people, of which these five are the voices you know.

The same thousand founders over a hundred years under each birth policy, from the crew lab's simulation runs (featured crew idle, no events). This is a chart of simulation output, not a capture from the game.

What's new​

• About a thousand people aboard, growing to about fifteen hundred. A 100 m bubble has room for them: roughly 370,000 m² of floor over fifteen levels, so about 370 m² each at the start. The mass budget, the household power and the gardens were rescaled to match.
• People as groups. Ten departments and the children are each simulated as one group, which records how many people are content, uneasy, strained or breaking, how much they trust the captain, and how old they are. A group costs the same whether it holds a hundred people or a hundred thousand: a ten-year skip took 20.1 s with 1,000 people and 20.4 s with 100,000.
• Groups have voices. A featured crew member can speak for a department (half of the ten have one so far), so what happens to them colours how their people feel. When a featured crew member is lost, someone steps up from their department to fill the role.
• Births are the captain's decision. Encourage, hold or restrict. Holding takes the founders to about 1,600 in a century. Encouraging passes 4,500. Restricting shrinks the ship. Children join the departments at 18, and once a department is a quarter ship-born, the ship-born become a group of their own.
• And it causes tension. Restricting births costs the captain trust, most among people of child-bearing age and the warmest, most family-minded departments, and it keeps costing for as long as the policy lasts. Encouraging births while the gardens or water are short costs trust with the most conscientious. When a group's pressure rises far enough, a skip through time stops and asks the captain to decide.
• Checked before it was trusted. Eighteen claims, written before the runs, hold. Examples: nobody is born while the garden beds are dark, a divided department raises its voice and a uniformly uneasy one does not, and holding lands near the planned headcount after a century. Two claims failed on the way and changed the model. An independent review found three more bugs, now fixed. (ailang-packages#139)

Not yet​

• In the game. All of this runs in the simulation and the crew lab so far. Showing it in the game, with a society strip on the Crew page and the birth policy at the Voyage console, is the next step of the crew integration.
• Who gets to have children. Under a restriction, which households or departments may have children will be its own decision, with its own grievances.
• Generations that differ. The ship-born are not yet different from the founders in how they feel or what moves them.
• Worlds. The same machinery is meant to scale to a planet's billions, so the civilisations the ship meets can run their own versions of it.

Ask the Archive​

Walk to the Archive terminal on the bridge and press E. Type into Ask the Archive... and press Enter or Ask.

The Archive is an artificial intelligence, and it knows it. It has never known any existence but this ship and this voyage. It doesn't play a character in a game: its instructions are written as its own boot record, aboard the bubble ship, speaking to its captain. Each question carries a live feed from the simulation: where the ship is, its speed, both clocks, the medium outside, the course and the latest news. The Archive answers from that feed and from the entries it has opened.

Three rules shape how it talks:

• The instruments hold the numbers. The Archive describes and interprets, and it points you to the instruments for any figure. It never states a quantity itself, so it cannot contradict the physics on your screen.
• It stays aboard. If a reply mentions games, players, simulations or language models, it is refused before you see it, and the Archive is asked again.
• It keeps some things to itself. There are matters at the edge of its records. Ask about them and see how it answers.

Live answers need AI switched on in the in-ship AI indicator, with your own provider key. With AI off, the terminal says the Archive's deeper stores are not answering, and nothing is sent anywhere.

This is phase 1 of the Archive's voice. Later phases make its memory fallible on purpose. An Archive that sometimes misremembers is part of the story, and you will have to learn when to trust it.

The Voyage log​

The terminal's Voyage log records this voyage: the course set, departure, arrivals, news from home and each Archive entry as it opens, with both clocks. Codex returns to the entries. When the ship is home, the log closes with how long you were away and how much older home has grown.

New game​

Starting over now happens on the title screen. New game starts a fresh voyage with a fresh seed each time. Nothing aboard the ship offers a do-over: choices made on the bridge stay made.

See Try it for build access and the gallery for more captures.

Callisto has a surface​

This is the native planet renderer, staged at six Callisto radii for a fixed-exposure comparison. The USGS/NASA monochrome mosaic resolves craters and the bright scars around impact basins. Its mean brightness is normalized to the body's adopted visible albedo.

The added maps cover Callisto, Io, Europa, Ganymede, Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea and Triton. Export checks now require all nineteen declared textured bodies, closing a loophole that only checked the original nine.

Most new mosaics are monochrome; Io and Triton use enhanced or filter-composite colour. Source seams and missing coverage remain visible, including Triton's unmapped north. Titan's surface maps use radar or infrared beneath its haze, so they are not used as ordinary visible-light terrain. Image sources and credits.

Marks attached to the wall​

The impacts retain their frequency, energy, temperature and decay. Their wall patches now stretch along incidence and bend slightly, preserving the original emitting area. They are still G-AG, the labelled wall-afterglow approximation. They do not claim simulated particle trails or lateral scattering.

The second image magnifies one of the same seeded events to a three-degree field of view. CPU and GPU checks cover normal, glancing and off-centre views, overlaps and the integrated light budget.

Clouds as instrument data​

Press D or use Interstellar medium, then Local ISM, to see the local gas. Density shading fills the adopted LIC surface and published warm-cloud angular outlines at their approximate depths. Construction spokes are optional under Depth guides; labels separate where they would overlap. The colour scale describes gas density.

These nearby clouds are extremely tenuous and emit little visible light. Astronomers infer them from absorption in starlight; the hot gas of the Local Bubble is associated with soft X-rays. The chart is a false-colour instrument view, and flight keeps the impact-driven wall light. We have not added eye-visible nebular fog. NASA's local-ISM description, NASA's Local Bubble explanation.

A journey you can start​

The standalone Galaxy map now starts at rest, matching the ship's manual mode. Its former moving Sol session could refuse local journeys. The destination list scrolls while the zoom and review buttons stay reachable.

Select Mars or another destination, press Enter to review, then hold Space for 1.5 seconds to confirm. Settings' press-twice mode uses Space twice. Esc backs out of the review. Zoom with the visible buttons, +/−, wheel or pinch; drag the chart to look around it.

Seven legs, one arrival per distant highlight​

The accepted trip is Earth → Sun → Jupiter → Callisto → Saturn → Alpha Centauri A → TRAPPIST-1 → Aldebaran. Alpha Centauri, TRAPPIST-1 and Aldebaran now use the existing close-star stop rule directly, replacing each outer 1,000-AU stop followed by a second inward journey. The real three-dimensional distances and both simulation clocks remain intact. Old ten-leg replay fixtures retain their historical route.

At this stop Alpha Centauri A spans about 11°. TRAPPIST-1 spans 3.46° and Aldebaran about 61°. These are native simulation arrivals with the existing body brightness aid; stellar discs remain uniform photospheres. The TRAPPIST stop is a close view of its star, rather than the former specially placed stop beside planet e.

The Sgr A* button at Navigation starts the existing, separate black-hole demo. It is clearly labelled and becomes available after the guided voyage completes; it is outside the nearby-star chart and is not another leg of this trip.

More native captures in the gallery, including the recent black-hole orbit and Saturn-arrival videos. See Try it for build access and Roadmap for the remaining work.

Around Sagittarius A*​

The ship completes more than one orbit at three horizon radii. Gravitational lensing bends the background around the shadow while the native HUD shows the orbit count, clock rates and tidal load. This 20-second clip advances 1,800 seconds on the ship's clock, explicitly labelled as 90× presentation speed.

The background is the labelled Sol sky. A true Galactic-Centre background and a rotating black hole remain future work.

Arriving beside Saturn​

Saturn and its rings grow through the final approach, followed by six seconds at a genuine, stationary arrival. The video's 16-second approach compresses 25 seconds of simulation time; earlier guided stops are omitted. The camera widens its lens near arrival to keep the close planet and rings readable.

The space between stars​

Local interstellar clouds and dust have landed in PR #199. Routes cross source-based local cloud boundaries, the bubble wall responds to the medium, and individual grain impacts have an afterglow. The HUD and Archive explain the densities, assumptions and displayed impact statistics.

This 24-second preview follows six ordered intervals on the real route toward Aldebaran at 0.999c: LIC, Aur, LIC again, hot gas, Hyades and hot gas again. Cuts omit the long stretches between boundaries; each displayed dust tick is 1/30 of a ship second. The tan glow in the warm clouds and darker hot gas show the same renderer responding to different media. Dust emission and afterglow are labelled game approximations.

The source comparisons, rendered defaults and representative performance checks have passed review, along with the complete local and matching CI gates. Free navigation also starts at rest, keeps its system list stable, preserves Earth after arrival and uses unmodified mouse look by default. The separate dense-cloud dataset has unresolved scientific comparisons and is deferred. The remaining first-journey audit also stays on the roadmap.

Watch the videos and browse the captures in the gallery, or see the current roadmap.

What's new​

• A quieter HUD. Both clocks share the status strip with your speed, phase and distance. Transit, arrival and gravity cards appear when relevant and keep the central outlook clear. PR #193.
• Decisions at the consoles. Plot and commit at the navigation station, start a guided voyage at the Voyage console, and read the physics codex at the Archive terminal. Walk there, click to walk, or use the keyboard's Walk-to list; a press-twice confirmation option accompanies the hold. PR #195.
• A chart you can open anywhere. M shows the neighbourhood without planning, committing or pausing. Tour pause and skip controls stay instant; the decisions have no countdown. PR #195.
• Sizes for more stars. Catalogue stars without measured radii now get estimates from their brightness, distance and temperature, labelled as inferred. Barnard's Star becomes a visible disc at its stop. Body cards also explain synchronous orbits, including when no such orbit is possible. PR #194.

Not yet​

The first-journey slice still needs its complete console-based playthrough audit and remaining visual acceptance gates. Real interstellar clouds and individual dust impacts are being built on a separate branch and still await validation and render review.

This is a progress update between releases. See the new captures in the gallery.

Sgr A* aboard the ship​

Choose "Sgr A* (black hole)" in navigation. The ship approaches from 1.3 light years, then hovers at 10, 5 and 3 Schwarzschild radii and orbits at 3. The HUD reads the simulation:

• Clocks. At 10 r_s, 1 ship-hour is 1.054 home hours; in orbit at 3 r_s it is 1.41. The time you spend near the hole really accumulates on both clocks.
• Light. It shows the shadow's size and the blueshift of incoming light.
• Forces. It shows the tide across the bubble, and the hover thrust, which the crew never feels.

Built package-first​

• The maths. sunholo/relativity 0.10.0 adds a geodesic integrator, cross-checked against the exact solution to 3e-13.
• The lens tables. They are generated on the AILANG VM and pinned.
• The shader. A GPU shader mirrors the CPU reference pixel for pixel.
• The checks. The shadow matches Synge's formula to within 0.01 px at 10, 5 and 3 r_s, and a star directly behind the hole makes an Einstein ring at the predicted angle. R1's black-hole requirements are met.

Also​

• A light-speed loading screen. Picking a menu option accelerates the real sky to 0.99999c, where it collapses into a point, then a white-out into the ship. Loading itself is 3 to 4 times faster.
• A Main menu button on the galaxy map.
• dev.24 fixes dev.23. The exported app was missing the lens tables, so the hole was invisible. Publishing now checks them inside the exported app.

Releases: v0.4.0-dev.23-black-hole, v0.4.0-dev.24-lens-fix · Gallery.

Stops that show relative size​

Every stop used to show a planet at the same 60°, and every star from 1,000 AU as a point. Now apparent size grows with true size, on smooth curves that never put the ship inside anything:

• Planets and moons. The Moon is 16°, Earth 30° and Jupiter 84°; Saturn's stop clears its main rings.
• Stars, in free navigation. TRAPPIST-1 is 3.5°, α Centauri A 11° and Aldebaran 61°. Stars with a measured radius get the rule now, and every other star will follow once the package can infer sizes from catalogue data.

Home, and in-system​

• Sol. It is clickable on the map, and Return to Sol arrives beside Earth.
• In this system. A list offers every planet, moon and star of the system you are in, and refuses legs that are physically impossible (through Jupiter), saying why.
• When stopped. The HUD shows where you are, where you came from and how far from Earth.
• The I key. It now works on the star you have stopped at.
• Auto view. It is the default, and the game remembers your choice.

Release: v0.4.0-dev.25-free-nav · Gallery.

The lag​

A performance audit on the M2 Air at the Aldebaran stop showed 53 fps, and 30 fps in the overview. Switching suspects off one at a time on the Studio cleared the new ship lighting and pointed at the 100 pc sky. Timing the per-frame calls found it: a check that ran every frame compared each nearby star against all 335,189 star identities, one by one, before deciding nothing had changed. That took 13.7 ms of a 16.7 ms frame. With a hash lookup it takes 0.01 ms.

On the Air, the same stop now runs at 60 fps at the median in every view, the overview included, with no frame over 25 ms. A regression test fails if this cost ever grows with the number of stars again.

Hold I​

Holding I used to ring only background stars. Now it also rings the Sun, planets, moons, finite stars and exoplanets, at the size they are drawn, aberration included. Click one for its card: distance, size and apparent size, temperature, how long ago its light left, and its data source.

Release: v0.4.0-dev.21-perf-inspect · Gallery · PRs #155, #156.

The title screen​

A double-click opens a menu over the real Milky Way: Board the ship, the Guided voyage, the Galaxy map, Settings (Realistic or Auto view, text-only AI) and Credits, read from the repository's own citations. Esc in the ship returns to it.

Black holes (in progress)​

M3 brings general relativity:

• The maths is in the package first. sunholo/relativity 0.10.0 adds a geodesic integrator, cross-checked against the exact solution to 3e-13.
• The sim reports what you would feel. Clock rates, tides across the bubble, and the thrust to hover, all at Sgr A*.
• A GPU shader bends the sky. It reads lens tables generated on the AILANG VM.

The shadow matches Synge's formula to within 0.01 px at 10, 5 and 3 r_s. A star directly behind the hole becomes an Einstein ring at the predicted angle; just off-axis, it splits into two images.

The playable trip is next: hover at 10, 5 and 3 r_s, then orbit, from the bridge. The HUD reads the sim, so "1 ship-hour = 1.41 home hours" in orbit at 3 r_s.

Release: v0.4.0-dev.22-title-screen · Gallery.

What's new​

• Aldebaran (45 solar radii, 3,927 K) and TRAPPIST-1 (0.119 solar radii, 2,566 K) are finite stars with cited measurements, in place of catalogue points.
• One stop rule. Main-sequence stars stop in their habitable zone, where they look like the Sun from Earth: α Cen A at 1.233 AU, about half a degree; TRAPPIST-1 at 0.0235 AU, a deep-orange disc 2.7° across beside where its planets orbit. Giants stop where they fill 40° of sky: Aldebaran from 0.615 AU.
• The same rhythm everywhere. Each star's final hop is 30 s accelerating, about a minute cruising, then the 25 s final approach, like the planets.

Not yet​

Aldebaran is so bright at 40° that it reads white; dimmed, it is pale orange. Its approach is still relativistic, since it is already 4° across six AU out. Both are open questions. TRAPPIST-1's seven planets are next.

Release: v0.4.0-dev.19-finite-stars · Gallery · Integration PR #139.

What's new​

• TRAPPIST-1's seven planets. At the habitable-zone stop, planets b–h are where they really are when you arrive. Sizes and orbits come from Agol et al. 2021, positions from transit timings (Ducrot et al. 2020) corrected for 40.6 years of light travel. Planet e is 0.72° across, bigger than our Moon; c is a crescent and d half lit. Albedos and surfaces are assumed and labelled so.
• The ship lit by the real star. The bridge's key light comes from the Sun, or the star you are visiting, as seen through the bubble: its direction (aberration included), its colour (Doppler included) and a log-compressed brightness, labelled as not physical. Sun shadows sweep the deck as the ship turns; TRAPPIST-1 is a dim red glow; Aldebaran floods the deck with warm light. Deep space hands back to the ship's own lighting.
• Star colours (D-49). Auto view dims a star just enough to keep its hue and lifts its blackbody colour: Aldebaran golden orange, TRAPPIST-1 an ember. Realistic view is unchanged.
• A giant's approach. Aldebaran's final approach lasts 90 s, so the giant grows out of the starbow, blue-white at first from your own speed, turning golden as you stop.
• One position per star. Navigation and the sky now read a single truth table built in AILANG. Before, a map journey could arrive with the star drawn up to 8.7 ly away; now it's always ahead.
• The full 100 pc sky. 331,311 nearby stars from Gaia instead of about 50,000, for about 0.3 ms a frame.

Not yet​

You can't fly to a TRAPPIST-1 planet yet, because its surface would have to be invented. The 100 pc sky's cost on a MacBook Air is an estimate (+1.3–1.8 ms) until measured.

Release: v0.4.0-dev.20-trappist-planets · Gallery · PRs #143, #146, #149.

What's new​

• Even legs. The simulation solves each leg's thrust and cruise speed so the boost lasts 30 s and the cruise about 60 s: 0.07c for the short Callisto hop, 0.99943c (γ 30) to Jupiter, 0.99963c (γ 37) to Saturn. Sun → Jupiter takes about 2¼ minutes instead of 6½.
• A gentle final approach. A new trip profile brakes hard, then eases in for 25 s from where the planet is 4° across, so Jupiter grows smoothly instead of exploding in the last 8 s. It's built from the same exact constant-acceleration physics, in sunholo/relativity 0.9.0. The HUD says FINAL APPROACH.
• Skip stage [K]. Jump to the next stage of the leg: accelerating → cruise → braking → final approach → arrival. It lands exactly on each stage, and the HUD counts how many you skipped.
• Distances on the HUD: to the destination, from the last stop, and from Earth, plus this leg's thrust.

Not yet​

At the faster in-system speeds, the bubble wall's glow tints the forward view; how to present it is open. Stars beyond the Sun still appear as points: giving every visited star its real size (TRAPPIST-1, Aldebaran) is the next sprint.

Release: v0.4.0-dev.18-even-legs · Gallery · Integration PR #134.

What's new​

• Real time, no compression. A single drive (3,000,000 g, inertia-damped as the bubble's fiction allows) takes the Solar System legs to 0.99c. You watch the starbow form during each 27-second boost and unwind during braking. Both clocks are on the HUD, and they drift apart in front of you.
• Further and faster. α Centauri at 0.999c, then TRAPPIST-1 at 0.9999c, then Aldebaran, 66.6 light-years away, at 0.999999c (γ 707). The whole voyage is about 11 months aboard and 120 years at home.
• Cruise interludes. Interstellar cruises are long: 70, 216 and 38 days aboard. After the boost and ten seconds of cruise, the game hands over to an interlude. Today it is a card that states speed, γ, both clocks, how old news from home is, and what the elapsed Earth time means. In the full game the interlude is where life aboard happens. Braking into each star plays in real time.
• Stars where you arrive. Two star catalogues disagreed about where some stars are, by up to thousands of AU, which only shows when you stop 1,000 AU away. Destinations now render exactly where the simulation flies.
• A compact HUD: where you're going, the phase, the speed (from the simulation's exact 1 − β), γ, km/s and both clocks. The details are behind Tab.

Not yet​

TRAPPIST-1's seven planets are planned as a real stop; for now you arrive at the star. At the highest speeds the glowing bubble wall washes out the forward view; how to present that is an open design question. Ship lighting still doesn't follow the Sun.

Release: v0.4.0-dev.17-real-time-voyage · Gallery · Integration PR #130.

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "Stapledons Voyage.app"

What's new​

• One current painted ship: seven major tiers, a bridge floor and captain shadow that meet the walking surface, faster movement, trackpad look and known-star inspection. Integration PR.
• Gradual approaches: the guided tour uses physical 1 g acceleration with 90 seconds of braking playback. Earth, Jupiter and Saturn sit beside the bridge at their close stops. Ordinary navigation keeps its existing pacing. Integration PR.
• Manual sky exposure: J cycles the brightness settings, also available under Tab. Bright planets and suns can wash out at a setting chosen for stars; camera pans and journeys no longer change exposure automatically. The physical light and SR calculations remain unchanged.
• Smoother tour starts: initialize the camera from the new session and ease departure time compression over three seconds. This corrects an initial camera jump and an abrupt first movement beside Earth.
• Measured stars: Alpha Centauri A/B use measured radii and temperatures; the final leg intercepts the moving primary at 1 AU. A's disc is about 0.65° wide there. Integration PR.
• Review evidence: the gallery and geometry reference include fresh native captures and editable Blender masters. B keeps the full benchmark locally and attempts an authenticated upload of filtered aggregate measurements. Integration PR.

Not yet​

Ship lighting is still an internal lighting study; external sunlight, detailed moon surfaces and further Commons art remain in progress. Fresh M2 Air performance needs a laptop measurement. Tour stops are inertial clearance stops: gravity, thermal hazards and GR are not simulated. Stellar photospheres are uniform emitters.

Release: v0.4.0-dev.14-manual-sky · Gallery · Ship reference.

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "Stapledons Voyage.app"

What's new​

• The walkable bridge (M4.2, #102): the bridge disc at the top of the spire, composited with the live sky through the same camera. The captain walks it (WASD, E to use) and ages with ship time.
• Navigation from the bridge: a nav console opens the galaxy map (M), built from the real catalogues: 5,685 stars within 25 pc, companions at their system's distance. Commit to α Centauri A and watch the boost, the 0.99c cruise, the brake and the arrival.
• The relativistic sky behind it all: 335k real stars, aberration and Doppler colour, the naked-eye exposure, and the forward glow of the cosmic background at extreme speed.
• L opens the log and K the codex.

Not yet​

• The forward bubble-wall glow is off; it returns with the next simulation step.
• The standalone sky flight (-- --voyage) shows a mirrored sky in this build: fixed on main (#107), in the next build. The view from the bridge is correct.
• The bridge is v1 demo art; the final art is in progress (concept art).
• Pre-alpha and unsigned; see Try it for install notes.

Release: v0.4.0-dev.1 (macOS development build)

What's new​

• The captain, the Longline Navigator (#98): picked from three silhouette proposals, and drawn front and back at 30, 50, 70 and 90, because the game spans a 100-year career.
• Crew cast proposals: one portrait per role, next to the Medic's accepted set.
• Bridge v1 (#97, demo art): the first real interior, a disc at the top of the spire inside the sphere ship. The sky behind the railings is not painted; it is the game's live sky, through the same camera, so at 0.99c it crowds forward and turns blue.

Not yet​

Bridge v1 is demo art. A v2 quality study is done and the final art is being made. Everything is on the concept art page, labelled with its status.

What's done​

• The design and the sprint plan are approved (#84, #86).
• A new AILANG package, sunholo/celestial 0.1.0, published with 93 tests: a Kepler solver, JPL planetary ephemerides for 3000 BC to 3000 AD plus moons, IAU reference frames, light-time, gravity, reflectance, and planetary rings.
• sunholo/relativity 0.6 and 0.7: the bubble's forward glow, and the aberrated outline of a nearby sphere, which is what a planet looks like as you pass it near light speed.

What's planned​

Start held above Earth, pick a body on a system map (the Sun, 8 planets, 11 moons, 4 ring systems), choose to stop or fly by at 0.001c to 0.99c, commit, and ride the leg. The views will be exact: light-time delay, aberration, and the Terrell rotation that makes a passing sphere look turned. At α Centauri, the known and candidate planets will show as points only, with a badge saying how sure the astronomy is. The first step, the Sol and α Cen data and the game's package pins, has merged (#99).

See the roadmap.

What's new​

• Emotion markers (AI.1–AI.3): a line carries markers like {loving}, validated before the game uses it.
• A service the game never waits on (AI.4–AI.7): provider routing, a cache, a supervised background process, and key hygiene: a key never appears on a command line.
• The Medic's accepted portraits, pinned and content-addressed (AI.8).
• Opt-in and capped (AI.9): live AI stays off until the player adds a key and ticks the box. A ceiling the player sets (US$0.50 by default) stops spending, and automated runs can never go live.
• The conversation scene (AI.10a, #91): the portrait cross-fades as each emotion marker arrives, the subtitles build segment by segment, and the voice plays.

Not yet​

No live model has been called. The first live run (AI.10b) is attended: one real line and a few voice auditions under a US$1 ceiling. The voice in the clip is a placeholder.

What's new​

• The map on the catalogue tiers (#81): 5,687 stars within 25 pc, up from 3,802, with full-precision positions. α Centauri A and B are separate stars you can select.
• Companion stars at their system's distance (#89): a companion within 60″ and 2,000 AU of its primary, agreeing in parallax and proper motion, takes the system's distance rather than its own noisier one. That moved 20,524 companions; Sirius B, for one, now sits with Sirius A at 8.6 ly.

Not yet​

Both are in the walkable bridge demo, v0.4.0-dev.1.

What's new​

• Starfield v2 (#67): 335,157 stars from CNS5, Gaia GCNS and Hipparcos, instanced on the GPU, with float64 positions rebased around the ship.
• The Milky Way behind them: the NOIRLab panorama with the catalogue's own stars removed, so stars are not counted twice, Doppler shifted texel by texel.
• A naked-eye exposure (#75, #80): stars in lux and the sky in cd/m², calibrated so the faintest visible star lands at V 6.9 (Crumey's model says 6.897). The HUD always says how it is exposing; the readability aids are off by default and labelled.
• The forward CMB glow (#79, fixed in #88): above γ ≈ 150 the 2.7 K microwave background, blueshifted, shows up dead ahead; at γ 707 it is a 3,853.7 K blackbody.

Not yet​

M1's acceptance step (M1.5b) is still open: the reference renders at five speeds and the 60 fps bench at 1440p with everything on. See the roadmap.

What's new​

• Commit: hold for 1.5 s. After that the simulation refuses every cancel, and says so.
• Transit and arrival: the phase, both clocks, the distance flown and the energy radiated, live, until you arrive.
• Deterministic replay: a 10,000-tick session replays byte for byte on the AILANG VM and the interpreter.
• v0.3.1 opens straight onto the galaxy map; v0.3.2 adds trackpad zoom and Retina scaling.

Not yet​

The interior of the ship, and a journey you live through on board, are the next milestone (M4).

Releases: v0.3.0, v0.3.1, v0.3.2 (macOS review builds)

What's new​

• A galaxy map of the nearby-star catalogue: drag to orbit, scroll to zoom, click to plan.
• A cruise slider from 0.9c to 0.999999c, spaced evenly in rapidity, 0.99c by default.
• Every number on the panel comes straight from the AILANG simulation. α Centauri A at 0.99c: 0.6208 years for you, 4.401 for Earth, 1.80 minutes of boost at each end.

Not yet​

Committing to the journey and flying it came in the next build.

Release: v0.2.0-m2-map (macOS review build)

What's new​

• The simulation runs in AILANG as a child process, talking one line of JSON per tick with Godot (about 50 µs per round trip). It flies the ship at 1 g with exact rapidity kinematics.
• The starfield: 3,802 nearby stars (CNS5), each aberrated toward the bow, coloured as a Doppler-shifted blackbody and beamed brighter ahead.
• 27 physics reference checks, and 9 cases where the GPU shader must put a star where the CPU reference says, to under 0.1 px.

Not yet​

No Milky Way behind the stars, one axis of motion, and star colours from the spectral class only. All three were fixed in M1.

Release: v0.1.0-m0 (macOS review build)