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Old April 23rd, 2010, 07:45 AM
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Default Re: Off Topic Thread

Oh, it is still going... sorry for the lack of updates!

This week, along with various behind-the-scenes changes/fixes/additions, there are now realistic units of distance (km, ls, au, ly), and the "mod editor" app now supports saving and loading, though you still can't edit much of anything yet!

The "realistic units of distance" probably merits a bit of explanation: Yes, a planet might have a radius of, say, 5,243 kilometers. And yes, it could be several au from the planet to its star, which might have a radius of 1,000,000 km. And the next star over, yes, that might be 5 ly away!

So how do we display everything on screen without it all being teeny tiny little sub-pixel-sized dots? :P

That's where logarithms come in Since the scale of space IS so vast, we're now using a logarithmic display scale for the zoomed-out views of objects; only VAST differences in size will be noticeable. So Jupiter will look bigger than Earth, but not that MUCH bigger, at least not until you zoom in on it (we're still maintaining the actual sizes for collision detection and zoomed-in views!)
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