I, Voyager

I, Voyager is

1. an open-source software planetarium
2. a development platform for creating games and educational apps in a realistic solar system.

It is designed to be improved, modified and extended by the community. I, Voyager runs on the open-source Godot Engine and primarily uses Godot’s easy-to-learn GDScript (similar to Python). It can be extended into an independent free-standing project (a game or other software product) using GDScript, C# or C++.

I, Voyager is free to use and distribute under the permissive Apache License 2.0. Creators who build on I, Voyager can sell what they make without paying royalties or fees.

Please find more information at our website!

Goal #1: Make I, Voyager into a nonprofit entity!

See details below the screen captures!

Screen Captures!

Jupiter and Io viewed from Europa. We've hidden the interface for one of the best views in the solar system.

Jupiter and the four Galilean moons – Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto – embedded in the orbital paths of many smaller moons.

Saturn's rings and its close-orbiting moons.

Uranus' moons are an interesting cast of characters (literally). The planet's 98° axial tilt puts the inner solar system almost directly to the south in this image.

Here's the solar system on July 14, 2015, the day of New Horizon's flyby of the dwarf planet Pluto (♇). Not coincidentally, Pluto was near the plane of the ecliptic at this time.

Pluto and its moon Charon to scale. Both are tidally locked so their facing sides never change.

Jupiter (♃) is the shepherd of the Solar System, as is evident in the orbits of asteroids (64,738 shown here). The Main Belt (the ring) and Trojans (the two lobes leading and lagging Jupiter by 60°) are the most obvious features here. Hildas are also visible. I, Voyager has orbital data for >600,000 asteroids (numbered and multiposition) but can run with a reduced set filtered by magnitude.

Main Belt and Trojans viewed from the side. We use the GPU to calculate and update asteroid positions (each asteroid is a shader vertex that knows its own orbital parameters).

The Planetarium has easy-to-use interface panels that can be hidden.

For developers, we have a large set of GUI widgets that know how to talk to the simulator. These can be easily dropped into Containers to make your custom GUI however you like.

Here's our "starter GUI" in the Project Template to get you going on game development.

Please support the effort if you like what you see!