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Space Exploration - going about populating a system

Christopher Nye · 2013-08-06T12:47:38

So I'm working on a space exploration / sim. Here is the puzzle, some of you may already have experience with this and I thought I'd pick your brain. If you don't have experience... that's fine... let's hash over some development ideas. I am currently looking at a "level" or a "stage" as an entire solar system. What I do not want are "rooms" in a system (meaning the earth system, the mars system, the jupiter system, etc... where each system is its own scene). My idea is that as space is fairly large but empty... modern renderers should have little issue rendering what is really constant in a system: 1) the sun 2) the planets 3) some large moons The rest (asteroids, comets, minor moons, minor planets) can be instantiated as i need them to be. Perhaps trigger zones on a system that when crossed let the system know to create them. This would mean that if I am orbiting earth and I point at the sun and accelerate, that I should eventually be able to get to the sun and that I shouldn't need a loading screen to load me into the proper zone to do so. If I'm orbiting the earth, then the other planets should be present on the screen as tiny dots, much as they are in our sky in real life, and that if you point at one and accelerate towards it that you'd eventually reach it... that the earth would shrink to a dot... and the target planet grow until you were actually there. We can go a step farther and incorporate an orbital formula and have the planets orbit the star and also be in motion as well as add a rotational formula to let the planets rotate as well as with their moons. While this would be hard to perceive... if you stayed put for 24 hrs and took screen shots you'd see changes. Do you feel that this is a realistic model or do you feel that rendering these large objects (the sun for example would be a massive sphere and light emitter) constantly would cause performance issues?

General and Gameplay Programming Programming

Started by IcedCrow July 26, 2013 01:20 PM

22 comments, last by IcedCrow 10 years, 8 months ago

Hawkblood

1,019

August 05, 2013 01:07 AM

That's messed up..... I have only some of their shaders, but if you would like me to upload them, just let me know.

I'm going on another forum to see if I can get ahold of him......

IcedCrow

268

Author

August 05, 2013 03:27 AM

Link is up now. I'm looking at some. I appreciate that they show what they are supposed to be doing, but again its a matter of being able to read and understand why they are doing the things that they are doing that always get me.

I think I just need people to write shaders for me lol and then I can apply them and work with them.

For more on my wargaming title check out my dev blog at http://baelsoubliette.wordpress.com/

Hawkblood

1,019

August 05, 2013 04:40 PM

That was strange. It's up now.....

I think everything is in DBPro/DarkGDK, so you will have to convert them to match straight DX. If you need help with that, I can give you example code that I use.....

IcedCrow

268

Author

August 06, 2013 12:47 PM

Thank you much.

For more on my wargaming title check out my dev blog at http://baelsoubliette.wordpress.com/

Space Exploration - going about populating a system

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