Holy Shit Are You Serious is a space simulator by Vladimir Romanyuk, a.k.a. SpaceEngineer, in which you explore space. And… that’s it.

“That’s it?” I hear you say, “That’s it,” I answer. No pew-pew-pews, no aliens, no missions, nothing… yet. For now, it’s just for sightseeing. A planetarium, as it calls itself. Even so, I shat asteroids when I got my eyes on this.

I swear I tried to come up with something funny to say.

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The universe in Light-Speed Is So Slow is a 10 gigaparsec cube centered on Earth, in which 99.999% of the content is procedurally generated, save for real objects from official star catalogs.

Let me break down that number for you: One parsec is about 3.26 light years; one light year is the distance light travels in one year, or 9,460,528,400,000 km (or 5,878,499,810,000 miles, for the backward weirdos); so, one parsec is 30,856,775,790,000 km (19,173,500,000,000 miles); 10 gigaparsecs are 10 billion parsecs, so every edge of the cube that comprises the universe generated by Space Engine is 308,567,757,900,000,000,000,000 km long (FuckYouGoLearnMetric miles). In case that was hard to read, it’s over 308 sextillion km.

But wait! There’s more.

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That’s the length of the cube’s edges, how much is the actual volume of the cube? Why, just 308,567,757,900,000,000,000,000 times 308,567,757,900,000,000,000,000 times 308,567,757,900,000,000,000,000, which gives us 29,379,989,390,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 km3, or over 293 million vigintillion cubic kilometres (approximately 0.01 yourmoms).

But what does all this volume contain? Why, galaxies. Many, many, many galaxies, about 10 trillion, and EACH contains from a few billions to over 500 trillion stars. A very rough estimate would place the total number of stars in Unfathomable Size at around 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (one septillion). Knowing that most possess planets, that means- ah, fuck it.

So what are Vladimir’s thoughts on all this?

“Too small.“

Theory: Vladimirs tend to have a poor notion of size.

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“I must make it a few billion times bigger in each dimension.”

He wants it to be “a few billion times bigger” than 29,379,989,390,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 km3, because that’s too small.

How can you not love this guy?

I don’t think the couch will fit, honey.

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Too Small is the first game that made me understand how slow light-speed is. Set your velocity to 1c (light-speed), and watch the stars zoom- no. No, they don’t. In interstellar space, light-speed is like a snail on a highway. It’s borderline ridiculous.

The sights are amazing, scientifically-accurate, and despite several bugs and incomplete features (spaceship mode, for example), this shows tremendous promise. The music could be almost anything, honestly. Without a definitive mood set, whatever you wish to listen to while exploring ends up being adequate to your state of mind.

The hills are on fire with the sound of melting.

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How far the development goes depends on the donations received. Now at beta version 0.9.7.1, and having recently reached the milestone that guarantees a finished 1.0 freeware planetarium version with things like “particle effects: accretion and protoplanetary disks, weather effects, volcanoes, and ship engines exhaust” in the future, the donations keep coming in. The best part is that one of the next milestones is an actual single player space exploration game with shitloads of features, and I’ll let you read about the long-term goals yourself, because drool and keyboards don’t mix.

This planet was dry before I read the long-term goals.

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I will become deeply disappointed in humanity if the funding for this ever stops. I’ll retreat into a remote cave and never speak to anyone again. I mean it. Go fund them. Now. You need me, I need you, we all need this.