So I've been watching some gameplay videos of the system editor, where you see obviously unrealistic orbits taking place. For example, planet A has a satellite, planet B, which itself has a moon. Planet A is obviously much more massive that planet B and so its gravitational attraction is much stronger. The moon becomes equidistant from planet A and B and yet unnaturally continues along its path, orbiting planet B. The reason for this behavior is talked about in the system editor livestream. Basically, it's demonstrated how a realistic physics engine can very quickly run out of control, and so it was decided to include an option to have this sort of chaotic realism or just have planets obey the orbits that the user lays out for them. What I'd like to see is the ability to have a hybrid between these two options. Going for the all-out realism clearly is user unfriendly and unpredictable, but at the same time having planets strictly obey their preset orbits can also feel very artificial and unstatisfying. What I'd like to see is some sort of semi-realism. Satellites will, by and large, respect the orbits laid out for them. Any gravitational attraction below a certain threshold will be completely ignored and have no effect on the game. However, at the same time, gravitational attraction between satellites beyond a certain threshold shouldn't be ignored. If there comes a point where two satellites come so close together that it's just obvious they should be strongly interacting with each other, then they should do just that. I think this would be the best of both worlds, with the ability to have a user friendly, but aesthetically satisfying, simulation. You could even have a slider for how realistic you want the orbits to be. Thanks for reading.
There is a hybrid built in, it's labeled "Enable Physics Simulation" or some such. A full simulation is run instead of a 2-body system, allowing for really weird random stuff to happen. This more often than not, due to PA's weird gravitational constant and oversized planets in relation to their distance, results in visible collisions between planets. Unless you were some sort of... God of time, you would be hard-pressed to predict the path of a single body through a star system, let alone design a system that could be played in any sense other than watching a series of large planetary collisions and the resultant explosions. I am glad they're both in the game though. By the way, I have NO IDEA what the mass of the sun is, so that might be the reason everything acts so weird.
So basically what you're saying is that it's not feasible to have a useful system that can allow for dynamic orbits without becoming unpredictable and chaotic? The only feasible options are all or nothing? I'm only a lower tier backer so I don't have access to this stuff yet to see for myself. My instinctive reply to a situation where things are becoming too unpredictable would bet to just change the thresholds, so that the lower limit for when satellites would affect one another would be increased. What I'd really want is for orbits to act predictably and follow the preset paths unless it becomes very obvious that they shouldn't. But I am clearly oversimplifying a complex problem and I understand that resources are limited and good gameplay is way more important than making stuff look more realistic.
I've created my own "system" editor here(work in progress). There are some prefabs you can look at in the (turn off the glowfilter to get a better look at whats happening). stephenf.deviantart.com (scroll down the bottom to "solar system simulator" I cant post links direct) The problem with a true N by N simulation is of course instability. Also even if you have the orbits calculated before hand so they wont become a billards game after a few orbits, you need a lot of precision of the variables tracking the velocities and the coordinates as floating point errors creep in after a time (tho takes a long time though for this to happen and can be minimised). You can limit it to the planets only interacting with the parent star(just make sure theres no overlapping orbits of planets thats aren't synced with each other(eg resonant). A challenge I see for the team is asteroids? - what happens when they bump? will they have only local gravity with their parent planet/moon? Also - adding multi star systems.. there's one or two examples in my sim to give food for thought. Also.. deciding will there be colliding planets at all and will they go smush or smash? All of these things would want to be decided sharpish.
After seeing the July stream which showed the system creator, its seems like it will be possible to create at least single star systems. I think it wont take much extra to get trinary and quad star systems going with stable planets. you can see an example of a trinary star system with a single stable planet in my demo. I look forward to the system editor in particular to design interesting and novel systems. I think the approach with 1:1 gravity for parent child relationships will be the best model for stability. Possibilities depending on the complexity of the gravitational models are interesting for future modelling. Imagine a super weapon or super weapon mod that suddenly takes half the mass of a star, you would send all planets flying out of the system! Possibilities are crazy !!
