Noctis is a computer space flight simulator featuring first-person visual exploration of an imaginary galaxy. The player is manifested in Noctis as the pilot of spacecraft called a Stardrifter, capable of instantaneous interstellar travel. This allows travelling between stars, refuelling the Stardrifter from Lithium ion-ejecting stars, approaching planets in star systems and their moons, and even landing where it is physically possible. Many planets feature atmospheres and weather effects. Some harbour plants and animals, or even mysterious ruins. No goal or measure of success is imposed by the game: it simply allows the player to catalogue and annotate the player's discoveries in a common database of stellar bodies called the GUIDE, which is to be synchronised over the author's Internet server.
Gameplay
The Noctis galaxy, Feltyrion, is approximately 90 thousand light-years in radius, approximately double the radius of the Milky Way Galaxy. With the exception of landing on some world types, this galaxy is entirely open to be explored. Billions of worlds can be explored despite the program's relatively small size, due to its content being generated on the fly. The Noctis universe contains several types of planets and 12 types of stars, noted in-game with an S in front of the number of the star.
History
The Italian programmer Alessandro Ghignola began creating Noctis in 1996. Noctis versions I-IV were written in C and Assembly. Ghignola worked also on a new version in his original low-level programming language, called Linoleum. Noctis I through III, still available on the , contain features that were abandoned with later releases.
''Noctis IV'', ''NICE''
Noctis was originally based on DOS and uses a fixed display resolution of 320 x 200, and an upper limit imposed on the walking distance from a planetary landing site. These limitations do not apply to the Noctis galaxy because it contains over 78 billion stars, most of which host many planets and moons orbiting them. The current version of the game is called Noctis IV. In the release of Noctis IV, Ghignola included a facility to have planet names and notes sent back to him and then compiled into a central database of information called the GUIDE. People playing the simulator could then share their findings with others, and a community of explorers soon developed around that, vying for a wide range of discoveries, such as the planetary system with the most planets or the biggest tree in the Noctis universe. This is the only way to interact with other players, since Noctis, being a single-player game, has a protagonist who does not speak. For some time Ghignola regularly compiled a new GUIDE based on emailed submissions of players of their "Outbox" and allowed the compilation to be downloaded as an "Inbox". While the GUIDE has not been updated for several years since 2005, since December 2008 the service has been restored again. A more automatic system of "massively single-player" content sharing is used in 2008's Spore. The source code for Noctis IV was released to the public in 2003 under the WTOF Public License, which has led to the creation of a fan-made "mod" to the game called Noctis IV CE. NICE includes bug fixes and additional features which increase the playability compared to Noctis IV. The terrain generation code has also been altered in the NICE version, which means that remarks made in the Noctis IV GUIDE are largely invalid for NICE.
Future version (''Noctis V'')
A future version of Noctis is currently under development. Development of the project began on 11 October 2001. Noctis V promises to relieve the restrictions of the current Noctis platform, as described above. This is because the new version of Noctis is being developed in Linoleum, a low-level programming language that is currently being shaped to better suit Noctis. To paraphrase the official Noctis webpage: Linoleum and Noctis have evolved together. However, this also results in a slowdown of the program's development. Screenshots and details have been revealed by the developer and it is thought that the rendering engine has been completely redone from scratch, Ghignola first having attempted to simply translate the Noctis IV engine into Linoleum, before giving up and rewriting it. Ghignola has also mentioned experimenting with weather and particle effects, possibly things like snow and dust storms. There is no set release date for Noctis V, but Ghignola has repeatedly assured the game community that he has not given up on the project, and has no intention of doing so. The most recent assurance was in a May 9, 2012 interview with Videogame Porpourri, where Ghignola stated " keeps living in a corner of my mind, on a sort of unwritten post-it note. But it's there, ready to strike as soon as it gets an opportunity to incarnate."
Reception
The game gained popularity in early 2000 after receiving a very favourable review in Home of the Underdogs's list of worthwhile free games. Noctis earned a score of 9.43 out of 10 as well as the site's "Top Dog" award. The reviewer noted amongst other things the magnitude of the galaxy to explore and the total size of the simulator, which is less than one megabyte. An in-detail article of The Escapist's Phillip Scuderi noted the philosophical depth of Noctis in 2006.
