Sirius Online Interview

Sirius Online is a product of 15 years of passion, love and hard work. I’m making this game to play it myself, and for everyone that wants to tag along on this journey. If you ever played Freelancer and liked it, you'll feel at home in Sirius instantly. Basically, Sirius is Freelancer 2, just with a different name, story, graphics and a developer. Also, you'll meet me in game very often just to have a chat or a quick dogfight, or intense discussion about life, the world and everything.

Actually I started this game at €10, but it was reviewed so badly because of the price that I personally felt like lowering the price, reaching €0.99 in worst times. A bad launch, people expecting too much of an Early Access game all did factor in. I never felt confident nor comfortable in charging money at all, so people already had to convince me to put this game on Greenlight. I've been a bit late in the Indie Scene, and I never got those marketing skills. People in my family and friends told me to give this project up and learn a real job. And, after the G2A/Kinguin Incident (someone stole around 16k game keys from a batch destined to be destroyed, and resold them there. Sadly both sites refused to cooperate and take down the stolen keys.) obviously, bad price decisions and dire need for funds have lead to financial struggles and problems to add content.

My current plan is that the price will rise over the course of development, as €3 is barely enough for server cost and a few additions per month, €1 per completed feature set, so, after the Market and UI rework is done, will be the next rise.

Even though Sirius came before Star Citizen, the massive success of their Kickstarter spawned a FLOTY, a Flavor of the Year. Think back when Minecraft went big. Minecraft clones galore. FNAF [Five Nights At Freddy’s] and Slender? Even today, IndieDBs top visited games are FNAF and Slender clones. Every year has a flavor of the most cloned game. I actually expect this year to spawn some sort of Stardew Valley craze, as its insanely well done and a well deserved topseller. Open Ended "BYOA (Bring your own Adventure)" Games are rather easy to framework, even though adding usable content is the hurdle. Many people just try and give up after a while, so I'm certain the recent wave of these games will fade again.

That's going to get technical. But I'm trying to get it as understandable as I can. Sirius is based on a 15 year old engine called Blitz3D. It uses DirectX 7 (even though we expanded it to surpass a ton of its limitations), is open source and recently went free as well. We had a lot of struggles porting the Steam APIs to it, and get certain functions to work, like the recent Godray addition (a nasty engine hack, thanks to Xaymar, my brother, who works on the tech side of the game). We're limited to 2GB total RAM and one CPU core. So every step, every feature has to be optimized to no end. A skill that most modern games just forget about: Optimization. See Crysis 3 for example, where small, unreachable rocks somewhere in the background get tessellation for a few million polygons. Every model in game is optimized, every effect carefully calculated. A wrongly set line of code can absolutely destroy game performance. The base 10040 Patch for example. In eagerness to release it had a small memory leak ramping the usage up to 2.1GB, making the game stutter at the moment somebody took a seat in a capital ship. Another difficulty is Multiplayer Precision. While we have a pretty decent prediction system in motion already, so you can even fly decently on lag, NPCs are still Client-Based. It is a lot of work synchronizing NPCs between clients. There already were different attempts. Synchronising them all simultaneously over the server has lead to immense packet loss, simulating them moving and only sending data to players close went to intense 3D calculations in a 2D environment, stealing valuable resources from the server. We went with client based for now, as we take a look at other games solutions, like World of Warcraft, EVE or other popular MMOs. That's the way I work mostly. I see something cool and I'm like "How can I do this, more efficient, useful and optimized for my game?".

That one actually was easy. I created a lot of mathematical functions, to get average values of the seven base ores and from there I based every item on their contents. The future Item "Ferrum Sheathing", for example, would consist of 125 Ferrum Ore, taking (Ferrum_Price * 125) * Supply Modifier = Total_Price. A Supply Modifier is an indicator how well a station is supplied with items, actually LOWERING the prices of advanced wares, the better that station is situated with basic wares. A station in need is more willing to pay high prices for basic and advanced goods. And it should lure players out into space, to get to other stations. It still has a bug currently where you can drain stations supply below 0, but I'm actively working on this.

Now, let’s get some "Developer Nostalgia" over in here! The earliest Version i still have, is shown above. 

This was 2005, and at that time, I felt like the pinnacle of evolution. Locked resolution to 800x600, horrible controls, worse graphics, and a 2D Painted Cockpit. Yikes. Back then it was known as Ne0Cracy Online, shortly followed by StarRadon Online, Black Space and X - The Conflict (with endorsement of Egosoft). The idea of an MMO never left me. Five years after that video I was creating my own franchise called Asteroid Blast, basically a 3D Asteroids, with a local highscore list. It got a sequel and the third part, viewable below, was dubbed "The Sirius Incident" (you get where this is headed) and full of stuff taken from Freelancer.

Never made it public though.

In the following years it evolved and I gathered a small team of people who had absolutely no idea on how we'd all work together, from the US, over South Africa, to Serbia and Italy, we had our fair share of fun. The multiplayer aspect I'd given up on and it came back as an accident. While IndieE3 I had added LAN multiplayer mode per IP, and, in a random case of trying I put a graphics free client on a root server and tried to connect. It worked. Better than Direct Connection. and there evolved the game that you can experience today.

The current biggest ship is the Aeon, with its 13km length, and I want to keep all future ships to this length maximum.

The craziest feature... hmmm... I end up putting all of my crazy features ingame. A long term dream would be planetary colonisation with real buildings, Walking in stations and atmospheric combat. And randomised systems which despawn upon leaving. For each of those ideas I already have plans on how they might work.

As you might have learned, it's not my first title, but my first commercial title. I like to think big and I most definitely take this title as what it is: a learning experience. I learned so much along the journey of this game. I made friends all over the world, had fun, intense discussions with intelligent people, I proved people wrong who said "Never do an indie MMO!", that's stuff no one can take away from you. As we speak I have another three titles upcoming, a second MMO taking place in Iceland, and two side scrolling Shmups with different mechanics. One Containing a Pug, and another taking Music as its main feature. Sirius has been nothing but an intense journey that no one can take away. I might even redo the first two Asteroid Blasts together into a re-release with spiced up graphics for free.

Major Influence is, of course, Freelancer. It has heart, style and a very dedicated and loving community that deserves to be takes siriusly (Sorry, could not resist). The earlier X-games from Egosoft, like X - Beyond the Frontier and X2 the Threat has a huge impact on my programming and vision, and lastly: Wing Commander. I had an Amiga as a kid, and this game... boy it was hard, but rewarding. Aside from this, I'd say World of Warcraft has influenced it a bit, in terms of accessibility, as you can start up very easily.