Craziness confirmed. #Space #Game #Unreal #GameDev

I realize I drew some of my arrows wrong on the original drawing, doh!

I am crazy I think 😅

If I throw a wrench to my buddy, we can still:
Do all the physics of it floating, because it only takes into account my throw, it's spin, and no gravity. Cheap and easy. Replicate the Xforms from server to everyone else easily.

#physics #gamdev #unreal #multiplayer #space

Sun is just distant object for visual representation, spinning around the Earth. A Directional Light rotates as well to mimic light coming from that Sun.

The Earth rotating is accomplished by a material panning the texture over it, or even a rotation component so it spins in place. Material is cheap and fast. We never land on Earth, we'll burn up and lose if we do.
Goal is to keep our Station in orbit, and collect trash/resources to upgrade it.

The Station will be stationary,
If I radial burn, I push away Earth, or go towards it. That could be literally the Earth translating towards me (easiest, cheapest solution).

I may have a separate mode where you're a cube doing fun orbital dynamics, flying to other planets, but that will be self contained, no wrenches, more deterministic arcs and paths for just my station. Ignore that for now.

Solution: Station is stationary at origin, and we move the world around us. In this game we aren't going to fly to other planets while in Station mode

Yes you could have the moving platform (you stand on a train) and throw things at each other, but, it things get real nasty when we're moving at high speeds (floating point precesion, even with doubles, gets shitty far from origin, even a little far from origin I've noticed!).

Physics is based the whole world being still, so, any movement of my moving platform (me standing in a Station moving), has to be accounted for.

In Unreal: things explode, the wrench goes flying, even if I do a ton of math to add velocity. Multiplayer lag makes it insanely worst. You cannot have a moving frame of reference in Physics if that makes sense.

In actual space: If we grab a wrench, and toss a wrench to someone else in microgravity, it'll spin and go "linearly" in my frame of reference in the direction i threw it to my friend. That wrench inherits all the velocity from me orbiting in the station around Earth, Earth around Sun.