Creating a solar system and to scale?

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

I am trying to figure out how to approach making a level that is essentially a solar system.

To try and make everything to scale and fit it into the unreal space, everything has to be unimaginably small.

I have looked at games like eve online and elite dangerous to get some idea of how to incorporate this, but have come up empty.

Any suggested on how to do this? Any links to any tuts on the subject?

Thanks in advance to any who can help.

2

There are three possible approaches that I can think of:

  • Use a double-precision engine. That would take a lot of time…
  • Split objects into large and small categories - render small objects with one camera and large with another. Composite the final scene from the two.
  • Always keep the camera at 0,0,0 world position, and move everything in the world relative to the camera.

The last approach seems like the best option - but you have to build your game for it from the ground up and is still quite a challenge.

We ultimately gave up on realistic scale for Satellite Command (See signature)

3

It depends on what you’re doing–if you’re just trying to visually represent the solar system then you can scale things just fine so that they are correctly scaled relative to each other, but if you’re making a game where you’re flying around the solar system then that is much more complicated.

4

Can you explain that a bit better?