N-body physics

What would the performance cost be? Is it worth the time to develop in-depth (compared to the current) physics before Beta? The idea is a good one, but right now seems a bit early.

I think that would be really cool however it would probably be a performance hog. as long as it only applies to planets in a single system at a time that wouldnt be a problem (i think). as far as style go's starmade made a big step toward realistic phisics with the thrust update.

N-body realism really isn't needed. Even Kerbal Space Program only does patched conics where only one planet/moon exerts gravity on you at a time. Partly because of performance (N-body at 100,000X time acceleration can't be done...) but also because patched conics gets you about 95% realistic gravity.

Now if you're talking about planets and stars interacting with each other...that would be chaos. I don't think the game engine is up to handling collisions between planets.

Employee763 said:

Hello, all.

I don't know how well this suggestion will be taken, but here goes.

What if Star Made had semi-realistic gravitational physics? Like, planets, ships, and people all interacted with each other in a way that matched or vaguely resembled reality.

The map would show how each object's trajectory, and upgraded scanners could show smaller object's trajectories or orbits and improve the range at which you could predict these. Also, you could use a nav computer to plot out orbital trajectories and stuff.

Star Made's thrusters give you infinite delta-v, so it's not really that much of a learning curve.


Pros:
-Could establish stable orbits around planets
-Immersion
-Extra dimension of gameplay
-Physics is cool

Cons:
-Slight learning curve
-Less arcadey feel (Dunno how much of us are into that)
-Does it match w/ Star Made's over all feel? I don't know. It would change the game a lot

Click to expand...

It would be difficult to say the least, employing N-body physics in this game.
In the real universe the everything is a product of physics. The masses of every object, distances from one another orbital periods are all created by the system.
In this game the Objects aren't laid out in a manor that actually reflects such a system. They could be and they could be calculated to fit in such a system.
Take the current planets and stars then consider Orbital period - Wikipedia
And think about what that would spell out in the game. These planets would be moving around so fast they would be a blur.

That said it wouldn't take a massive amount of power to deal with. Really only systems someone is in would need to be updated. It depends on how much you put in a system as to how much processing power that would take. The amount of processing power it would take to update near bodies would be extremely small in comparison to other stuff done in game.

It would be extremely cool to have realistic gravitation physics, and, presently, really impractical. Sorry.

How would you deal with titans? I can imagine multi-kilometer long and million-metric ton carriers would have a decent effect on surrounding space. How would you calculate what everything fell towards.

Yrjosmiel said:

And this is how you'll explode every computer that runs Starmade. As much as I like this idea, we have to accept that fact that this will take a lot of processing power to implement. Maybe something similar, like patched conics in Kerbal Space Program?

Click to expand...

I'm not convinced we even need gravity to be honest. One of the devs recently mentioned that fixing collision damage was not on their to-do list. Planetary gravity is not much of a hazard without collision damage, so might as well just take it out completely IMO, at least with respect to ships. Planetary gravity should remain in astronaut mode. (Leave wormhole gravity though.)

I'm with everybody else on this - though I would like to see variable gravity (such as low grav on smaller vessels and stations). I'd guess that wouldnt be too hard to implement - even if there were only a couple of different settings: 0, 0.5, 1 and 2 strengths.

You can simulate almost anything and reduce the math involved if you are willing to create restraints to the problem.
Take N-body for example if you make a rule planets are effected by the sun and not one another that reduces the problem by several degrees.
You could then say moons are only effected by the planets they belong to.
This would allow mimicking a fairly stable galaxy. It however would prevent things like planets interacting with one another, solar systems from effecting one another as they pass through each other... You could go so far as to limit or eliminate star oscillation in its path around the galaxy and say stars don't interact with one another they are effected by the galaxy only. You would then need to create stuff like binary stars and so on manually.

If you do all that you could in effect just emulate the rotation and so on of the particular planets in the current solar system that is occupied because you really wouldn't need to for any that people are not in. Which means the amount of math is reduced down to a couple of bodies at best primarily the ship the nearest planet and the star. You could then test to see which object has the greatest gravitational effect and use it.

If you do all that you haven't got anything a great deal different than what exists now.