The Game Made From NASA Satellite Data

An anonymous reader writes "Kickstarter's helped start all sorts of indie games, but few as unusual as Lacuna Passage, an adventure game set on Mars with a vast open world that's been painstakingly recreated from NASA satellite data. You're able to explore twenty five square miles of the Red Planet in all its barren glory as you attempt to solve the mystery of the first, vanished, manned mission to mars. A new piece today on the making of the game — which is being made by an elementary school teacher and a team of a dozen volunteers — looks at how it came about, and why their quest for authenticity led to even urine analysis being included in the gameplay."

Comments

Urine analysis???

[Chemisor]

Which part of the computer do they expect us to pee into?

Oxygen levels?

[Midnight Thunder]

I noticed that there was an oxygen meter and it got me wondering how good CO2 scrubbers have got in modern space-suits. Does anyone know how long oxygen will last in a space-suit, with the help of a CO2 scrubber, based on current space walks?

Re:Oxygen levels?

[Dereck1701]

"life support capacity of 8 hours"

In that neighborhood, I imagine that is only a suggested safety limit for a standard suit though as a couple astronauts took a 8 hour 56 minute spacewalk (Helms & Voss back in 2001). The next gen space suit (which would likely be used on possible Mars missions) though is supposed to have a life support duration of 150 hours

Re:No vegetation

[Immerman]

Actually Mars is considerably smaller - a bit under 1/3 the diameter and a bit over 1/3 the surface gravity. The entire surface of Mars is roughly comparable in area to the landmass on Earth. And Earth's surface is mostly water.

Also if you want to get technical the detail is the same at one Plank-meter resolution. Earth just has a lot more vegetation masking the surface.

Oculus Rift support

[virgnarus]

The best thing about the game is their dedication to implement good Oculus Rift support, which is perfect for a game like this. Too many games haphazardly slap Rift support onto them and it becomes a mess trying to deal with menus designed for monitors being displayed on the Rift and other things that makes the Rift experience real poor. These devs, however, realize the obstacles with Rift support and are willing to put the extra effort into making it worthwhile.

Other NASA related games

[feddas]

Haven't games been using NASA data for a while? Maybe not to the extent of this game, but I played one a while back that looked like it used quite a bit of NASA data; http://rumorgames.com/press-release-voyager-grand-tour/

Re:No vegetation

[GumphMaster]

You greatly understate the size of Mars.

Equatorial radius of Earth: 6,378.1 km. Equatorial radius of Mars: 3396.2 km, or about 53% of the radius of Earth.

Re:No vegetation

[GumphMaster]

Sure, after you go back to grade school English comprehension. The post reads:

a bit under 1/3 the diameter .... of Earth

The diameter of Mars is 53% of the diameter of Earth, plainly much larger than the 33% poster thinks. I made no comment on the surface area claim, which is more-or-less correct.