SpaceProto is, as the name says, somewhat short of a full game. It aims to become, eventually, a 3D space adventure in the spirit of Elite and Privateer, but also highly customizable like the Escape Velocity series, only with a more modern approach. Right now, it is just a bit of a technology demo.

As it is, reality got in the way of fulfilling all ambitions within the given time-frame of three months. The game content is driven through a set of user-editable Ruby scripts, which interact with the Objective-C core engine. The game uses MacRuby to embed a fully featured Ruby runtime. All resources are user replaceable and editable. For 3D assets, the game supports rudimentary COLLADA import.

Planets are rendered in real-time, using atmospheric scattering to create a realistic, and pretty, view, both from nearby, within a planet’s atmosphere, and far away. CoreAnimation is used to overlay Cocoa widgets over the OpenGL map, and eventually will be used to animate the GUI.

For how SpaceProto works, please see the accompanying ReadMe.

In case it doesn’t run for you, or not with full graphics, on a good day it looks pretty good , and sometimes even awesome.