Is Leadwerks capable of physics required for space games?

[karmacomposer]

I am finally getting started on my project and the 1st part of it requires space physics (no terrain, flight-type motion and lack of gravity).

 

I assume Leadwerks can handle this?

 

Mike

[Canardia]

I've made a few space simulations with LE2, and had no bigger problems. You should use a quite small scale for models, because of the accuracy limitations of 32-bit floats. Hopefully LE3 can be recompiled as 64-bit float version (and also Newton 3.0) to overcome those limitations. A 64-bit float is not only twice as accurate, but 10 million times more accurate than a 32-bit float (7 vs 15 digits), and since in long range simulations we need also distance, the accuracy is converted into range.

[Guest Red Ocktober]

the scale and distances involved in setting up a model of the solar system could present quite a daunting challenge for Leadwerks... or for that matter, any game "engine" i'm aware of... depending, of course, on the level of realism you're going to be aiming for...

 

if done to scale, and the Sun were the size of a ball 8 inches in diameter, and the earth were the size of a peppercorn, 8/100 inch diameter... you'd have to place the earth about 26 yards away from the ball for it to represent the scaled distance correctly...

 

by the time you get to placing Pluto you'd have walked over a half a mile away from the ball which represents the sun, and it would barely be visible...

 

 

take a quick read of this http://www.noao.edu/...orn/pcmain.html article to get a layman's idea of the distances and scale i'm talking about...

 

 

--Mike

[gamecreator]

If you're talking about a game like Star Control II, that's no problem. If you don't need ship collision, you can even do your own movement and not worry about physics.

[Pixel Perfect]

I pretty much agree with that. In the early days of Leadwerks I needed to know if I could create the kind of space scenes I needed for my STRANDED game so I developed some motion code and tested it in in a simple scene. It was all pretty basic but inherently worked and I left it at that point with the intention of pickling it up again and expanding on the ideas once I'd completed the rest of my game engine.

 

This was the initial result:

 

Space Scene Video (wmv)

[Guest Red Ocktober]

i also toyed with the prospect of making a space travel game a while back...

 

 

the idea of journeying to another planet and landing on it has always fascinated me...

 

--Mike

[fumanshoo]

Not the best input, but you can also do:

 

SetWorldGravity(Vec3(0,0,0))

 

I'm sure you could get some fun results with that... if you are switching gravity off, you could set it to Vec3(0,.5,0)) to make your character float up...

[karmacomposer]

Fortunately, the game will not have you cruising the cosmos. Instead, it is location based. Inside the broken space ship, that is really a inside level with space scenes out whatever cracked and nearly crushed windows still exist. Getting to the space station will be an outside space scene, but your travel is somewhat limited since I want them getting to the space station.

 

After the space station, it's mostly effects and terrain-based.

 

That reminds me. Can Leadwerks be used this way? Part 1 is inside, Part 2 is in space and the rest is world-based.

 

I may make more space-related scenes, but none of them would have you traveling massive distances. That said, I do want the trip from the broken ship to the space station to appear VERY VERY far away and the planet below to be farther than that, so tiny scale will probably have to happen.

 

There is always the old trick of creating a very large sphere and having the user's ship in the center of the sphere. The sphere has space blackness and stars as its texture and looks very far away and all around (throw in a few nebula - or make those with particles). Then you move the sphere along with the user (parented) to simulate as if you are moving vast distances when really everything is coming to the user.

 

Mike

[Flexman]

i also toyed with the prospect of making a space travel game a while back...

 

 

the idea of journeying to another planet and landing on it has always fascinated me...

 

--Mike

 

Would this have included Sub-Space? :-)

 

As for the original posters query. Many useful answers, I'll just add to this the following...

 

You can have multiple "Worlds" (TWorld objects) and switch between them as you switch between the different play modes, Or use one and swap all the necessary settings as required. I'd be tempted to go for multiple words because later it's possible to have your space station interior with windows that look out into the space world (that takes some fiddling with the scene renderer but I've done "portalisation" with Leadwerks 2.x)..

 

So many different ways you can achieve what you want.

 

The sky sphere would work well too. Although if it was a skybox you can do advanced things like render a cubemap to it The source could be another TWorld populated by tiny nebulae and galaxies, then when you warp to a new sector you can slowly move the camera in the "nebulae" world and use the camera to update the local player skybox. This is mixing scales to layer a scene. Someone posted a CreateCubemap function somewhere a while back that takes views from a camera and rendered it to six buffers that can be painted onto each side of a box.

 

So many cool things you can do with a bit of work.

 

Hope that's not too much info. It's hard to explain clearly without a set if diagrams.

[Naughty Alien]

..it can do it..