One year!

Published on June 11, 2025, 3:52 p.m.
Last changed on June 12, 2025, 7:56 a.m.

A very very quick one for: one year + one month + one two-thirds of a day + one hour and a half. Give or take.

Ok yes I confess I missed the birthday - and yes, time flies!

I am happy with where Adlumens has gotten to. So: a little retrospective? A little look ahead perhaps?

Retrospective

At the beginning of 2024, Adlumens was in a state that could best be described as "a few python scripts ran from the command line on a couple of real/virtual machines". Local stuff, hardly user-friendly. And stricly personal.
Although far from complete(d), it has now had a domain name for more than one year, pointing to a website that runs relatively well and that keeps on getting enriched (albeit at my own snail-like pace!) with new functionalities. More or less chronologically:

the Data explorer…
… and its better-looking sibling the 3D explorer
the Tech tree
plus various Tools & experiments that allow me to test ideas, concepts and techniques, all the while letting it be enjoyed (I hope) by others

But perhaps what motivates me the most is that users - as in people - are actually registering on the site. Now, even though Adlumens doesn't exactly have millions of subscribed users, this is for me extremely significant because, well, because it means that what I do in my spare time is not entirely bad. 8-}
Dear users, keep on coming. I know the "logged in experience" is not exactly stellar (haha) at the moment, but my goal/obsession with a game is still very much present.

So, on behalf of the team (which pretty much means yours truly), and as discussed with some of you via email: thank you! :-)

Looking ahead

The latest released tool was the procedural/real-time planetary surface generator. An upcoming post will shed more light on this subject, but because of it and what I want it to do, I have had to quite literally claw my way back into several layers of:

Telluric planetary subtypes
Reduction versus oxidation principles
Silicates, nitrides, sulfates, borates, carbides and many, many others

The overall objective of doing that is not pleasure; it is to considerably improve two main planetary aspects:

from a purely mineralogic and geologic perspective, improve variety while trying to maintain pseudo-realism, all within the context of very long-lived crust/atmospheric interactions
from a visual perspective, enabling more possibilities in the rust/wasm binary that generates the planetary surface

In spite of sounding all very nice, this has been - and is - the cause of the complete reorganisation of the various basic components that make up planets, moons, belts, etc. In summary:

What?	How?
Primary constituents	Compounds (gases and minerals) are profoundly changed; and thus existing models acquire/lose several fields. Many new models have appeared as a result of a complexity shift
Server-side rust	Is of course strongly impacted, as its `Lazy` structures are now completely different: most `structs` are profoundly changed via python when it prints .rs files and so of course all the runtime code needs to change!
Army of templates	Many many templates now exist for cores, mantles, crusts and atmospheres.
Client-side	Of course the `rust/wasm` binary is impacted, but so is the Javascript… and the data modals when viewing a star/planet details are probably going to change heavily.
New data explorer subsection	Will expose templates, compounds, etc.

Time consuming but that's where I'm at. The good thing is: since this is all data-driven, the addition of exotic planetary subtypes ("Marshmallow planet") is just a matter of creating them in the admin and compiling the rust code anew. Cool heh? :)

This current endeavour is not complete and I am trying to work on it parallel to other aspects:

Tech tree/sciences reviews, additions and removals; principles of scientific research and its overall advancement speed. My vision against reality.
Blueprints rules/engine, resource gathering/refining and manufacturing (from small-scale equipment to macro-structures)
What constitutes a faction? What do you start with? What are the rules around its creation?
"Soft sciences" leading to modifiers applied to interactions between factions, be it trade, diplomacy or espionnage and intra-faction management.
In-game interactions: what and how? Very fuzzy at the moment I confess…
The constant struggle between the desire for granularity and the objective need for responsiveness/performance.
Game meta: is there an endgame? If so, what is it? What does it bring in terms of rewards? I have a few ideas around that, based around, believe it or not, some Fantasy MMOs…
Game meta: do I want a hardcore mode? A normal mode? A goofy mode? What is the point? Would players enjoy those?
NPC factions: yes or no? If yes, would I really want scripted dialogues/interactions à la Civilisation I. I'm exaggerating but you get the idea. LLM inference integration perhaps? If so, at what cost?

… all this while trying to stick to the almost hard sci-fi base principle.

In conclusion for now

A lot has been achieved, with which I am pretty satisfied. But there is no product yet. No product = no game = no achievement. So I will keep on working, have fun while doing so and hopefully this will one day see the light!