Welcome to Eclipsis Online

Eclipsis Online is our take on the space MMO: a universe where you can fly, mine, build, and battle your way across a galaxy.

With our Kickstarter launch coming soon, we thought it was time to share what's brewing.

Building the Universe

We started by putting together nebulae, stars, and galaxy bands using custom shaders, then added suns, planets, and moons. There are also asteroids, comets, and other anomalies, but we haven't dug into those in detail yet.

Next came the interface. We wanted something futuristic that feels at home in a spaceship. The panel corners, shield bar, and engine core design are all reusable components we can build on as we add more systems.

With the interface in place, we implemented the ship controls needed to get around. You can select a target and travel to it, warp between systems, and jump from one galaxy to another. That also meant creating maps to make navigation manageable. Finding your way around by selecting objects in the 3D view alone would quickly become a nightmare.

Making Space Feel Big

At this point, we hit a roadblock. The universe was growing inside the 3D scene, but it still didn't feel vast. Increasing the distances further introduced jitter, with objects visibly snapping between positions.

The culprit was floating-point precision. We store positions using 64-bit numbers, but our rendering uses 32-bit numbers. The farther you get from the coordinate origin, the less precisely those numbers can represent a position. Beyond roughly 16.8 million meters, they can no longer represent every one-meter increment, and visible jitter can appear well before that.

Our solution is a floating origin. The server tracks absolute positions, while rendering and physics work relative to a nearby local origin. When your ship crosses a cell boundary, we shift that local frame to bring the ship back near zero.

The universe never moves; your neighborhood does.

With that in place, we could spread things out without everything shaking apart. Now you can really feel the scale as you pass other objects out there.

Under the Hood

That's the visible side of our progress so far, but there's plenty happening underneath it.

The server is already running, and each new gameplay mechanic is built with both server and client logic in mind from the start. That helps us avoid the classic trap of building a client-only game and discovering later that multiplayer requires reworking the foundations.

We also have a working launcher that automatically patches the game as updates go live, so keeping up with new builds won't mean downloading everything manually.

What's Next

We're currently working on ship fittings, onboard systems, and power controls. Modifying your ship and balancing power across its systems will be a core part of the gameplay.

Thanks.