Vesperis 1.3.0

Vesperis 1.3.0: the far, the faint and the peoples.

A first-person, goal-less space exploration game, vibe coded and heavily inspired by Alessandro Ghignola's Noctis IV. Fly between the stars of a procedurally generated galaxy, land on planets and moons, walk or drive across terrain generated by the same function that painted the globe, and name what you find.

What is new since 1.2.0

• The galaxy chart. The star map's second page (M, then Tab) shows the whole disc by its stars, where the ship is, home and the signals you locked. Move the cursor anywhere: Enter plots the jump there, Enter again flies it. On a long flight the galaxy's band turns round the ship.
• Deep listening. The radar's gain (B, then +/-, x1 to x32) hears transmitters thousands of light years away, faint, slow to lock and mixed with the galaxy's noise. Only the peoples that reached the radio ages are on the air, each age with its own sound.
• The peoples' ages. Each dead people is found at the age it had reached when it fell, from the stone age to a far future:
  • Towns, roads and great works of that age across the people's own lands, laid out by a plan of its world (a capital, cities, towns and villages, the networks between them), seen from orbit and on the ground. Quarries, mines, dams, observatories, lighthouses, launch sites, forts and battlefields stand where the land and the history put them.
  • Buildings in an architecture of the people's own, in the forms of its age.
  • A history for each people: its eras, figures, institutions, wars and collapse. On a world of two peoples, both of one age, they meet, send envoys, make treaties and fight.
• The records. A people leaves 80 to 200 records in the genres of its age (annals, letters, songs, logs, sermons, broadcasts and more), in a tongue of its own, made on the materials of its time; some are music played on the people's instruments, some star charts drawn in its age's way. The decoder reads them on three pages: the records, a timeline of the people's eras, and the history as the records you have read tell it. Shift with the arrows runs the cursor.
• Instruments. The ruins hold the people's instruments, each people's made in its own way from what its world gave. Play them from the case on the cabin's left wall; the ship's player (Tab at the decoder's worlds) plays every piece and recording the ship holds and every broadcast the radar caught.
• The drone bay. Parked over a people's world, send the three drones from the rack by the front window: two minutes later they are back with records and instruments, 2 to 8 finds each, then they charge for five minutes.
• The landing map's peoples (V): the places the records you hold were kept, and a people's whole map once you hold all its records.
• A quieter view. On the ground the HUD keeps the essentials; Tab opens the readings (the place, the sky, the air, the ground, the vehicle). The scanner (R) hears the great works too.
• Bug fixes, among them freezes of several seconds at a landing, at Tab or R just after and at the landing map's Enter, and the CPU load while the landing map's cursor moves.

Saves from 1.2.0 load. The peoples were regenerated (generation 13): the shards you found are kept, with new contents.

Downloads

Platform	File
macOS (Apple silicon)	vesperis-1.3.0-macos-arm64.zip
macOS (Intel)	vesperis-1.3.0-macos-x86_64.zip
Linux x86_64	vesperis-1.3.0-linux-x86_64.zip
Linux arm64	vesperis-1.3.0-linux-arm64.zip
Windows x86_64	vesperis-1.3.0-windows-x86_64.zip
Windows arm64	vesperis-1.3.0-windows-arm64.zip

Unzip and run vesperis (Vesperis.app on macOS, vesperis.exe on Windows). Press H in the game for the keys.

• macOS: the app is not signed; right-click it and choose Open the first time, or run xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine Vesperis.app.
• Linux: needs an X11 display (XWayland works) and OpenGL 3.3; built on Ubuntu 20.04, so it runs on any distribution with glibc 2.31 or newer.
• Windows: a single executable, no installer.

Saves, settings and the guide (your names, notes and log) are written next to the game (the macOS app uses ~/Documents/vesperis).

Vesperis 1.2.0

Vesperis 1.2.0: time and witness.

A first-person, goal-less space exploration game, vibe coded and heavily inspired by Alessandro Ghignola's Noctis IV. Fly between the stars of a procedurally generated galaxy, land on planets and moons, walk or drive across terrain generated by the same function that painted the globe, and name what you find.

What is new since 1.1.0

• The almanac (Ctrl+T) lists the coming events where you are: sunrise and sunset, moonrises, full and new phases, eclipses, ring shadows, a comet's periapsis, a front's arrival, a meteor shower's peak. From the ship it lists moons passing behind the world, shadows, conjunctions and transits. Enter runs the clock to the event, slowing at the end so you see it happen.
• The telescope (Z) on the ship has zoom, a reticle, a stabiliser and photographs. Each cabin computer now has its own colour, and Shift+arrows carry a parked ship round its world.
• Weather that arrives. Fronts move across a world with a heading and a speed. They are visible from orbit and on the maps, come over the ridge as rain or dust, and appear in the data sheet's forecast.
• Nights. Meteor showers from the system's comets, the zodiacal light, earthshine.
• The gas giant probe (C over a giant):
  • The fall passes above the clouds, through the haze, the ammonia deck seen as a landscape, the clear air between decks and the water deck under the lamp, until the pressure ends it. Shift runs it faster.
  • Every giant is its own, with decks where its temperature makes them, storms (a great storm with a wall on one giant in four), lightning, aurorae and a deep glow. Ice giants and brown dwarfs have their own look.
  • What comes back: the descent is kept as a recording in the gallery, with its final image and a depth profile on the giant's data sheet. Friends get recordings through the guide export.
• Jump any distance. In the aim (R), type a number of light years and press Enter: the ship flies that far along your view to the star nearest the end. The galaxy's width takes 87 seconds. Stars you have visited are marked VISITED on the aim, the radar and the star map.
• Your own marks and a scanner on the ground.
  • R cycles a scanner through ruins, lakes, peaks, craters, canyons, mesas, geysers and crystals, pointing at the nearest within 40 km. Shift+R leaves out what you have already marked.
  • L marks the spot under the crosshair. The sector map (N) has a cursor to place, rename and remove marks and set the waypoint.
  • Marks show on the maps and over the view. Landmarks you named in 1.1.0 become marks.
• Bug fixes.

Saves from 1.1.0 load. The gas giants were regenerated (generation 12), so one you saw may look different.

Downloads

Platform	File
macOS (Apple silicon)	vesperis-1.2.0-macos-arm64.zip
macOS (Intel)	vesperis-1.2.0-macos-x86_64.zip
Linux x86_64	vesperis-1.2.0-linux-x86_64.zip
Linux arm64	vesperis-1.2.0-linux-arm64.zip
Windows x86_64	vesperis-1.2.0-windows-x86_64.zip
Windows arm64	vesperis-1.2.0-windows-arm64.zip

Unzip and run vesperis (Vesperis.app on macOS, vesperis.exe on Windows). Press H in the game for the keys.

• macOS: the app is not signed; right-click it and choose Open the first time, or run xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine Vesperis.app.
• Linux: needs an X11 display (XWayland works) and OpenGL 3.3; built on Ubuntu 20.04, so it runs on any distribution with glibc 2.31 or newer.
• Windows: a single executable, no installer.

Saves, settings and the guide (your names, notes and log) are written next to the game (the macOS app uses ~/Documents/vesperis).

Vesperis 1.1.0

Vesperis 1.1.0: the galaxy, the star classes and the dead peoples.

A first-person, goal-less space exploration game, vibe coded and heavily inspired by Alessandro Ghignola's Noctis IV. Fly between the stars of a procedurally generated galaxy, land on planets and moons, walk or drive across terrain generated by the same function that painted the globe, and name what you find.

What is new since 1.0.0

• The galaxy has the proportions of ours: 200 billion stars in a disc with a bulge, four arms, globular and open clusters and star-forming complexes; the band of the galaxy, integrated through its dust, lies in every sky. Home is the same star as before.
• Fourteen kinds of star. Red dwarfs that flare and lock their inner worlds, blue-white stars, orange giants, carbon stars, neutron stars with debris systems and glassed worlds, protostars in their nebula, Wolf-Rayet stars with a shell ring in the sky, black holes with lensing, an accretion ring and a drawn-out companion.
• The dead peoples. One desert or felisian world in eight once had a civilisation: hamlets, villages and towns in a style of the world's own, weathered by their age, that read the terrain they stood on (harbours, terraces, cisterns, wind walls, cairns), roads between them and graves outside them. Fifty recordings per people lie in the ruins: texts, music and star charts. Take them to the ship and decode them on the cabin's back wall, in a language you learn shard by shard, spoken in a synthesised voice of the world's own and played in its own musical tradition. One such world in five had two peoples.
• The signal radar on the ship finds the worlds that still transmit, and the pulsars, comets and magnetospheres that only sound like them.
• Lending. A friend's decoded shards travel with the guide export and read on your decoder in cyan.
• Aurorae as curtains in the sky's geometry, by the world's magnetic field and the star's storms; the drone on the surface; bug fixes.

Saves from 1.0.0 load, but the galaxy was rebuilt (generation 11): a saved star may be gone, and the game says so.

Downloads

Platform	File
macOS (Apple silicon)	vesperis-1.1.0-macos-arm64.zip
macOS (Intel)	vesperis-1.1.0-macos-x86_64.zip
Linux x86_64	vesperis-1.1.0-linux-x86_64.zip
Linux arm64	vesperis-1.1.0-linux-arm64.zip
Windows x86_64	vesperis-1.1.0-windows-x86_64.zip
Windows arm64	vesperis-1.1.0-windows-arm64.zip

Unzip and run vesperis (Vesperis.app on macOS, vesperis.exe on Windows). Press H in the game for the keys.

• macOS: the app is not signed; right-click it and choose Open the first time, or run xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine Vesperis.app.
• Linux: needs an X11 display (XWayland works) and OpenGL 3.3; built on Ubuntu 20.04, so it runs on any distribution with glibc 2.31 or newer.
• Windows: a single executable, no installer.

Saves, settings and the guide (your names, notes and log) are written next to the game (the macOS app uses ~/Documents/vesperis).

Vesperis 1.0.0

Vesperis 1.0.0, the first public release.

A first-person, goal-less space exploration game, vibe coded and heavily inspired by Alessandro Ghignola's Noctis IV. Fly between the stars of a procedurally generated galaxy, land on planets and moons, walk or drive across terrain generated by the same function that painted the globe, and name what you find.

Downloads

Platform	File
macOS (Apple silicon)	vesperis-1.0.0-macos-arm64.zip
macOS (Intel)	vesperis-1.0.0-macos-x86_64.zip
Linux x86_64	vesperis-1.0.0-linux-x86_64.zip
Linux arm64	vesperis-1.0.0-linux-arm64.zip
Windows x86_64	vesperis-1.0.0-windows-x86_64.zip
Windows arm64	vesperis-1.0.0-windows-arm64.zip

Unzip and run vesperis (Vesperis.app on macOS, vesperis.exe on Windows). Press H in the game for the keys.

• macOS: the app is not signed; right-click it and choose Open the first time, or run xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine Vesperis.app.
• Linux: needs an X11 display (XWayland works) and OpenGL 3.3; built on Debian 11, so it runs on any distribution with glibc 2.31 or newer.
• Windows: a single executable, no installer.

Saves, settings and the guide (your names, notes and log) are written next to the game (the macOS app uses ~/Documents/vesperis).