Noctis
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Noctis is a freeware space flight simulator created by Alessandro Ghignola. Noctis development began in 1996, and it is still being worked on today in its fifth incarnation.
It is a space simulation where the player takes the role of an explorer in a space craft called a Stardrifter. There is no set goal in the game except exploring a huge fictional galaxy and possibly cataloguing your findings. This involves travelling between stars, refueling near suitable stars, visiting the planets in solar systems and their moons, and even exploring the planet surface of worlds whose environments allow landing. Planets feature atmospheres, weather, sometimes plants and animals, and sometimes mysterious ruins. Stars, planets and moons can all be named and have notes written about them for future reference, through an in-game interface which is actually rendered as a computer screen inside the Stardrifter.
Noctis is a DOS based program, and with that come some natural limitations of that environment, the most obvious of which are the display resolution which is fixed at 320 x 200, and a maximum imposed on the walking distance from a planetary landing site. These limitations do not apply to the galaxy that is explored, as it contains over seven billion stars, most of which host many planets and moons orbiting them. A future version of Noctis tentatively named Noctis V, which is to remove the current restrictions, is currently under development.
In the release of Noctis IV, Alessandro included a facility to have planet names and notes sent back to him and then compiled into the central database of information called the GUIDE. People playing the simulator could then share their findings with others, and community of explorers soon developed around that, vying for discoveries like a system with the most planets or the biggest tree in the Noctis universe.
The game gained popularity in early 2000 after receiving a very favourable review in Home of the Underdogs's list of worthwhile free games, noting amongst other things the magnitude of the galaxy to explore and that the total size of the simulator is under one megabyte.
External links
- The official Noctis webpage (http://www.anywherebb.com)
- The Fan-Fic Noctis Timeline (http://wolfchar.freeshell.org/timeline.html)