A long time ago, there was this idea and the ambition to make a multiplayer version of “X - Beyond the Frontier” and “X-Tension” by Egosoft, called “online-universe net”, which never happened.
I tried several times over the decades but failed every time I started because I didn’t know enough about some of the technical requirements.
Recently, I picked up this idea once again and filled my knowledge gaps with a bit of AI help.
Now, after about 2 months, I have a living universe in the style of X-BTF/X-Tension with stations, player and NPC freighters, and player/NPC productions in multiple space-sectors connected with jumpgates.
I know I still have a lot to do; it’s only the beginning, the foundation of the final goal.
Technically, it’s a scalable system with 11 API servers that act as the “source of truth” for the data and “feed” all the node-servers, which are running with Babylon.js NullEngine (headless), Node.js, and Socket. io
Dev-Screenshots: Ingame Galaxy-Map, Ingame Sector-Map, Sightseeing Screenshots.
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I love this! The amount of time I have spent in X-3 and X-4 is… considerable 
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Now i maded (with a bit AI help) a parser, viewer, exporter for the old properitary format from the 1990th “X-BTF” Models into babylon.js 
(with GLB and JSON exports … and so on)
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Just another babylon.js based tool to combine json and glb models together for the game;) (like an asteroid as glb and the attatched mining-station as json)
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So far - final model viewer for the X-BTF Models with textures.
Next Step is to implement the materials intoi the glb and json exporter …
Its so nice to have a babylon viewer-editor 
I bailed out and replaced some elements of the original models per manually pixel and verticles edits, exported them from the babylon model viewer into glb format and combined the model with my own sluice. …
Brings back the very oldschool vibes in a pixelmaster-job making pixel by piyes, triangle by triangle, mesh by mesh manually, handmaded ^^
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babylon is so cool to do such things
next admin tool finished … admin interface → ship manager → ships listing Let create automatically a simple bounding box (json) of the ship (glb) for the backend (nullengine) collision model and let save it into the shipmodels-API. And view the combination of glb object / ship and the created json bounding-box:
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I love reading your updates, please keep sharing them!
First glb Model “Teladi Geier” is flying in the universe (byside the other green placeholder models).
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and a sightseeing screenshot
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4 reworked player-vessels in a show-room (babylon engine ofcourse )
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… i now have 3d cockpit models for the player-ships
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created a new file-map, created a new function-map, .. and so on …
So i can give a summary update so far:
- 30 frontend files with 275 functions in 253 kb code
- 39 backend files with 195 functions in 225 kb code
- 223 kb sql backup code in so 25 tables
- 335 kb API scripts in so 30 files
… thats an entire full scalable online-MMO System based on babylon/nullengine - (without assets) …
