hey guys, im wondering how eve online handles its coordiantes..? it is obvious that the objects in eve are not as huge as they appear to be. but i have no idea how they position these objects or show you flying past them at warp speeds. The scale of the game is amazing. what trickery is this..? I know from experiance that if you try to make big objects or objects far apart from one another, your going to run into rounding errors etc that makes things jittery and glitchy. any insight on this?

i tried googling..but 'eve' and 'coordinate' in the same search just results in alot of eve related stuff.

Most likely they have more than one space. Only local coordinates for all objects and camera are used when displaying graphics. Multiple nearby spaces can be displayed at the same time to provide seamless transitioning. Offset of current scene is only added when displaying the coordinates as text or similar.

That's pretty much what I meant by offset of space. A space with floating point coordinates + some offset as in grid or some other data structure. Regardless whether they would be using 2D grid, 3D grid, octree, adjacency map or something else to quickly locate the space in super-space containing all other spaces. Unless you thought I meant something else in which case I am curious what you thought I meant?

I don't know if they changed it, but back when I played it (somewhere around 2009, I think) there was a document from GoonSwarm called GridFu or something similar. The document described how the grids (i.e. the areas where one object (like a ship, wreck etc) was observable from another location in space) worked, and how it could be abused. And it apparently worked with some kind of adapting system, where the grids grew, split and merged depending on some factors.

In other words, it was able to make the grids grow so that you could see other players over much larger distances than was normally possible, create areas in space where you could see the ships at a gate from 500km away, but the empty area in between was in another grid so that the ship 500 km from the gate seemed to disappear if you tried to approach it, etc.

Anyway, my point is, it was not a simple, static grid solution. More likely some kind of sparse grid solution, where grids were created and destroyed based on where players (and other objects) where located.

the veniculair eve online players use is "grid" rather than coordinate system. A quick google reveals this article which may provide some insight.
http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Grid_Manipulation

Since the local coordinate system eve uses is manipulatable (each grid can be made bigger and smaller during runtime).

Some other useful information I can remember off the top of my head is that nothing between grids can interact with each other, and you cannot see any ships or non-planetary objects that are in any other grid than your own.