hello, I would like to make a space sim game with planets that that actualy feel huge, all in a solar sistem that large enough to have them a considerable distance away. i quickly noticed as soon as i added the first spheres and scaled and positioned them how i liked there was a message that said there were floating point limitations and to consider placing them closer to the center.
My question is how is this limitation going to concern the game and if there is a way to have a smaller universe feel large? up to now all i got is scaleing the bodies with the distance but im unsure if that will affect the paralax and reducing the speed of ships to make a planet feel larget due to paralax. Please if you know of any optimization for large scenes or some “optical ilusions” so to speak, that will make things look larger i`d very much apreciate if you share them with me. Thanks a lot!
Your question has several possible answers but I will try to give you some ideas. I have several scenes that require “vast scale” in the scene. The answer I’ve settled on employs a combination of several techniques. The first method I’ve employed in several ways, but in essence is “endless terrain”… achieved by tiling terrains and keeping a small grid of terrains surrounding the player at all times. This can lead to the same problem as “infinite space” in Unity, where transform float values exceed Unity’s ability to keep them accurate. The most common solution for this is to move everything in the scene instead of moving the player character, mostly by either anchoring objects in the hierarchy or explicitly moving them in script.
Large objects in the scene can both be moved and be scaled to affect apparent visual size (remember in a space scene your ship wouldn’t fly to the planet, the planet would come to your ship, allowing several visual “tricks” like scaling). To help keep the scene “light weight” enough for smoother processing, objects can be added and removed to create a “procedural environment”. Combinations of these and similar techniques should help you achieve your goals.
To put things into perspective, Kerbal Space Program keeps everything on a fairly accurate cosmic scale, except for a few small details: Anything not close to the player doesn’t use PhysX for physics and, instead, uses alternate formulas to determine their orbits. Additionally, in order to not have floating point imprecision problems when very far from the center of the solar system, all distances are based from a starting point of the player’s current position.
By doing this, floating point accuracy doesn’t become a hindrance, since the system used for the math changes before any objects can get too far away for it to be relevant.