v0.1.0 - A cube learns to fly
This is where Nova Protocol started. The pitch was slightly delusional: watch a bit of The Expanse, decide "I can make a game like this", and then spend the next few weeks discovering how much space sim hides behind that sentence. v0.1.0 is the first playable answer - build a modular ship out of sections, fly it on real thrusters, and pull other ships apart with turret fire. It is rough, but the shape of every later system is already visible here.
Watch the devlog
Prefer to watch? The very first devlog covers this release on video:
A place to fly
To make a space sim you first need space. Before there is anything to build or shoot, there has to be somewhere to put it, so v0.1.0 opens with a test scene that stands in for the void.
A generated skybox
The backdrop is a generated star field wrapped around the scene as a skybox. It is not just decoration: without a horizon or a floor, a skybox is the only thing that gives you any sense of which way you are facing out in open space.
Asteroids and debris, sort of
Scattered through the scene is a handful of objects standing in for asteroids and debris. They are placeholders more than props - something to aim at, ram into, and bounce off - but they turn an empty box into a place with things in it, which is exactly what the physics and the guns needed to have something to do.
Ships built from sections
A ship in v0.1.0 is not one object but a set of sections bolted together. The player ship started life as the least glamorous thing possible: a default cube. Every mechanic that follows is really a mechanic attached to a section, and the ship is just the sum of the sections you have bolted on.
The thruster section
The first real mechanic was the thruster section - a cylinder that applies an impulse in the direction it faces. Hook it to the W key and the ship drifts forward (and, on the first try, straight into a rock - boom). Because the physics engine is already doing the work of moving mass around, the thruster does not have to be clever: it just pushes.
Rotation from more thrusters
Forward-only is not flight. But since the physics is already handling the push, rotation is just more thrusters bound to more keys, placed off-center so their impulse generates torque instead of straight-line thrust. Bolt a few on and you get a slightly cursed ship that can genuinely turn, pitch, and roll - all of it falling out of the same one trick.
Local health per section
Every section carries its own health too, so damage is local from day one. There is no single hull hit-points bar; each piece tracks its own condition. Shoot a piece off and the rest of the hull keeps flying, which is the entire foundation the combat model is built on.
Steering that does not fight you
Flying purely on hand-placed thrusters is fun for about a minute and then it is just hard. Firing individual attitude thrusters by hand to point somewhere is a juggling act, so v0.1.0 introduced a dedicated steering section to do it for you.
Mouse delta to target rotation
The steering section reads the mouse delta each frame and turns it into a target rotation - where you want the nose to point - rather than a raw force. You aim, and the section figures out the torque needed to get there.
The PD controller
Getting to that target smoothly is the job of a proportional-derivative controller. The proportional term applies torque in proportion to how far off the current heading is; the derivative term damps that so the hull settles instead of overshooting and oscillating. The first pass flew like a shopping trolley; after tuning the constants it started to feel like a spaceship. This is the seed the flight computer later grew from.
Turrets and first combat
Then: combat. The turret section is what turns a ship you can fly into a ship that can fight.
Yaw base and tilt head
The turret sits on the hull with a yaw base and a tilt head, so it can track in
two axes and aim where the ship designates rather than only pointing where the
hull happens to face. Getting the angles right was the hard part - anyone who
says programming does not need math has not tried to aim a turret. After a
healthy amount of atan2 and vector algebra it finally pointed where it should.
A clamped slew rate
An unclamped turret snaps around like it is possessed. So the turret's rotation speed is clamped: it slews toward its target at a fixed rate, which means the guns track a moving target smoothly instead of teleporting onto it. It looks mechanical in the good way.
Muzzle flash and raycast projectiles
Firing spawns a muzzle flash at the barrel and a projectile that flies forward under its own motion. Each tick the projectile raycasts along its path to see what it hit, so hits register cleanly even at speed rather than relying on a slow-moving collider to overlap the target.
Satisfying destruction
Hits have to mean something, so a section that reaches zero health does not just vanish.
Two ways to take damage
Damage comes from two sources. The first is turret rounds landing on a section. The second is ramming: a collision does damage scaled by the collision velocity, so a gentle nudge is harmless but flying into a rock (or another ship) at speed tears sections off. It also means you can absolutely kill yourself by driving badly, which is only fair.
The mesh slicer
When a section's health hits zero, a mesh slicer breaks it into chunks that physics flings apart. A kill reads like a real explosion rather than a disappearing box - the pieces scatter with their own momentum and tumble away. And because health lives per section, destruction stays local: shoot the turret off and the ship keeps flying but stops shooting.
Editor and a place to fly
Two scenes wrap it all up into an actual loop.
The editor scene
The editor scene is where you assemble a ship out of sections - thrusters, steering, turrets, hull - into a design of your own before ever taking it out. It is bare-bones, but it is the front end that makes "modular ship" mean something you build rather than something handed to you.
The simulation scene
The simulation scene is where you drop that ship in and fly. Skybox, debris, thrusters, turrets, and destruction all live here, so this is where the whole thing comes together: build a ship, take it out, and blow things (including yourself) up.
Together they make v0.1.0 a complete loop. Every later system - the diegetic autopilot, the section-based combat model, the spherical HUD - is already visible in outline here.