This is awesome. I've been working on a similar concept based on the Escape Velocity series and love the space trader genre in general. I'm curious how you've thought about the faction organization structures as well as information flows in the sim? Are agents omniscient about prices and postings? I ended up making in-sim information a commodity that agents could choose to sell to each other, but I didn't follow through fully baking that dynamic.
I have also been using LLMs (mostly claude code) to develop a game with Rust and Bevy, and it seems to work very well. The strictness of rust seems to really help them get the code right, and the ECS architecture seems to make it easy for them to reason about how things work (because they only need to hold a few systems and components in context at a time).
makes me wonder if ECS will ever catch on outside the gaming industry. not sure if it's really the right architecture for web SAAS. Might be interesting to rewrite some big piece of software with ECS.
Really wish they would spend a cycle or two on the automation/economy side. I know they've been really into combat lately. It's one of those games where the scale is exhilarating and then you spend hours cursing at the screen as the NPCs completely ignore all of the logistical rules you painstakingly setup.
I just started working on some similar stuff, it’s been a dream forever but I never had time for the payoff to feel worthwhile. Would love to hear more about your Claude workflow and experience with Bevy, did you consider Godot?
I did! I am more familiar with Godot but just ran into performance issues and then switched off their node scene straight to their rendering API, which made me feel like I abandoned Godot at that point. I am sure it could be optimized more but I want to worry less about chucking rendering and more scaling the economy simulation the further it went out, thus the more things to render, the harder it was for Godot.
Bevu/Rust just made it easier to brute force that scaling, since they have smaller footprints (overhead?)for each thread/process spawning.
I think it would be cool if you can host a simulation and enable online viewers. Have the simulation accessible from a website (god-mode disabled of course), and have an agent generate some sort of newspaper or news bulletin of interesting things that happen.
It’s fun to see projects like this that seem largely unlocked by LLM assistance, and probably wouldn’t even get started if it weren’t for them. I know the hype cycle for LLMs seems to have hit its peak already, but I am fully convinced we are still in the early days of what we’ll be doing with them in software development. The only problem I see with projects like this is that there could be so many of them. Personally I’ve built at least 5 things that I had thought would be fun, but realistically I just didn’t have the time. Now I do, and if they only scratch my personal itches, that’s okay.
The whole thing originated years ago to see what LLMs were capable of. Just spent a chunk of my Fable access hacking away at it. Is it intended to be 100% realistic, no. Its more art, tho I do try to lean into physics...
This is awesome. I've been working on a similar concept based on the Escape Velocity series and love the space trader genre in general. I'm curious how you've thought about the faction organization structures as well as information flows in the sim? Are agents omniscient about prices and postings? I ended up making in-sim information a commodity that agents could choose to sell to each other, but I didn't follow through fully baking that dynamic.
I have also been using LLMs (mostly claude code) to develop a game with Rust and Bevy, and it seems to work very well. The strictness of rust seems to really help them get the code right, and the ECS architecture seems to make it easy for them to reason about how things work (because they only need to hold a few systems and components in context at a time).
makes me wonder if ECS will ever catch on outside the gaming industry. not sure if it's really the right architecture for web SAAS. Might be interesting to rewrite some big piece of software with ECS.
ECS is basically column storage, but extended to behavior, not just data.
throws away spec doc for my own
Are we all having this idea?
Hilariously I also had a very similar idea just recently.
What is it about the space industry life that makes us developers adore it so much? :p
X4 Foundations just got a big update if you’re looking for a game built around this industry sandbox idea.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4382310/Warp_to_Sector_On...
I came across this recently ... hints of Tradewars from the good old days.
Really wish they would spend a cycle or two on the automation/economy side. I know they've been really into combat lately. It's one of those games where the scale is exhilarating and then you spend hours cursing at the screen as the NPCs completely ignore all of the logistical rules you painstakingly setup.
Ooooh didn't know it had an update! Thanks for posting.
I just started working on some similar stuff, it’s been a dream forever but I never had time for the payoff to feel worthwhile. Would love to hear more about your Claude workflow and experience with Bevy, did you consider Godot?
I did! I am more familiar with Godot but just ran into performance issues and then switched off their node scene straight to their rendering API, which made me feel like I abandoned Godot at that point. I am sure it could be optimized more but I want to worry less about chucking rendering and more scaling the economy simulation the further it went out, thus the more things to render, the harder it was for Godot.
Bevu/Rust just made it easier to brute force that scaling, since they have smaller footprints (overhead?)for each thread/process spawning.
Neat idea!
I think it would be cool if you can host a simulation and enable online viewers. Have the simulation accessible from a website (god-mode disabled of course), and have an agent generate some sort of newspaper or news bulletin of interesting things that happen.
It’s fun to see projects like this that seem largely unlocked by LLM assistance, and probably wouldn’t even get started if it weren’t for them. I know the hype cycle for LLMs seems to have hit its peak already, but I am fully convinced we are still in the early days of what we’ll be doing with them in software development. The only problem I see with projects like this is that there could be so many of them. Personally I’ve built at least 5 things that I had thought would be fun, but realistically I just didn’t have the time. Now I do, and if they only scratch my personal itches, that’s okay.
Yup, lots of stuff I'd love to dive into that having an assistance coder makes way more approachable on nights or weekends to get things done.
And yah, ideally there should be tons more! The shift will be interesting.
Not using big_space :(
Reminds me of SpaceTraders[1]
[1]: https://spacetraders.io/
You might also like my AI written zero player game/sim: https://github.com/derekburgess/simcraft
The whole thing originated years ago to see what LLMs were capable of. Just spent a chunk of my Fable access hacking away at it. Is it intended to be 100% realistic, no. Its more art, tho I do try to lean into physics...