Mars Live

Develop a game that simulates conditions in an off-Earth located permanent or temporary colony. The game could be a sandbox that offers the possibility to simulate various facilities that would support a reduced gravity environment far from earth’s atmosphere and magnetosphere. Users could be given power allowances, atmospheric conditions, and in situ resource options (using resources available on site for life support or other needs). The game could include a variety of scenarios including:

• Arranging a GPS-like system on the Moon or Mars to support navigation for the human inhabitants. The simulation could allow the users to explore different solutions such as a constellation of satellites, a network of masts or other Earth based methods at the challenger’s discretion.
• Players could build a habitat that could withstand the Lunar or Martian environment while also taking into consideration that its inhabitants need to have adequate power and supplies, be able to produce food, have locations sleep, live and work.
• Build a Virtual Moon telescope. The simulation could allow the user to conduct a research mission using a telescope on site near their habitat. Explore what instruments make sense for the location of the telescope (and what the user wants to observe). Game players could explore settings such as exposure times or wavelengths to observe. Observations could vary based on the position of the telescope on the Moon or Mars, and the relative position in the sky of the pointed object. After each simulated capture, show an appropriately generated image reflecting the exposure and wavelength settings.

Mars Live is an Map-based game, which simulates colonial life on Mars, where each colony has a set of specific tasks, which its colonists will have to complete in order to increase the rating of their colony. The colony division is done according to their respective coordinates on earth, that is, people close enough to each other on the earth, will be in the same colony in the game (we are mapping players' earth coordinates to martian coordinates). Tasks include, but are not limited to, gathering geological data (elevation, coordinates, weather conditions etc.). The vast variety of resources of data that have been used in creation of this game, will make players more aware of Mars in general and they will be more acquainted with everything that Mars has to offer (at least what is known to us so far).

You can take a look at our app by clicking here.

Maps

There are 3 different maps in the game, an elevation map, an infrared map and a map of visible surface. All 3 of them are fetched from google's servers at google.com/mars.

Coordinate Mapping

We use players earth longitude and latitude to place him/her on mars. To picture it visually imagine if we put mars inside the earth, and connected any point on the surface of the earth to the center of the planet, then took the place of intersection of the line and mars as our mapped location.

Mars Locations

We have included more than 1500 craters, mountains and other geographical sights in the application. Players can use our search functionality to find locations of those sigts and explore them on the map of their choice.

Mars Data

By long-pressing at any location on the map, user can find information about that location such as approximate elevation (in meters), predicted temperature, pressure, the speed of horisontal wind and more.

Colonies

A player is assigned to a colony according to his mapped location on mars such that players within 5km are assigned to the same colony. A colony can contain unlimited number of players. If a player is not located in the territory of any of the existing colonies, a new one is created. Users can see all of the existing colonies on the map in real time. Each colony has a live set of tasks that need to be taken care off, such as doing research about the red planet (finding the elevation of some point on the map, or predicting weather elements) and tasks about maintenance, such as cleaning the solar panels.

Chat

In order to add social feel to the game and make players feel on the same planet, we have implemented a simple chat interface that allows players to communicate with each other.

http://www.google.com/mars/ for fetching maps

http://jmars.mars.asu.edu/maps/?layer=MOLA_Color for map data of several kinds

http://www-mars.lmd.jussieu.fr/mcd_python/ for fetching real time predicted weather information

http://www.mars.asu.edu/data/ for learning about mapping techniques

http://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/Page/MARS/system Mars coordinate systems

http://www-mars.lmd.jussieu.fr/mars/time/martian_time.html learning about martian systems and writing a class for converting earth time to martian time