About

I initially started programming “Unknown Constellation” in early 2001 as the “sequel” to Sidus Obscurus. This time, the gameplay should have been much more strategic, as seen in games like Master of Orion or Ascendancy and it should have better visuals. But then I made a big mistake and started coding it using DirectDraw, and after running into some display problems and serious speed problems due to the fact that DirectDraw today is almost unaccelerated, I stopped the whole project. But almost two years after this I decided to reprogramm the whole game, but this time using OpenGL, with the gameplay basically being the same (Master of Orion like). During developement I released two technology demos (with the second one already having a lot of content) to the public but I early had to face the fact that porting the gameplay to realtime would have overwhelmed every human player, and I also didn’t have the time to create all the needed content for such a game (models, textures, and so on), so I decided to drop this project.

Tech

Written in Delphi with a custom OpenGL renderer.

Screenshots

Those screenshots are mainly from the second technology demo I released. Although they look rather advanced a lot of gameplay wasn’t implemented at that point.

Renderings

Models

These are renderings of some of the models I finished for Unknown Constellation.

Races

These would have been the races you would be able to play, and as you can see my modelling skills back in that day were very basic.