Hi This is a very common problem, even on smaller scales. Just to do a single system (ie, our own solar system) would be impossible. Maybe your best option is to render your scene sevaral times at different scales, render the largest scene first, apply it as a background to the next smallest scale render, then apply that as a background to the next smallest scale render and so on, right down to where you can only see 3km or so and render that. You would probably need 3 or so levels on your scene, one that included all the way to 4075 light years, then one that was just the solar system, then finally one that is just the little section of space your pilots in their ships can see. This of course gives you at most 1/3 of your original frame rate. There are options based on how the system is used you can use to optimise this. Firstly, unless you are flying the whole distance between star systems (rather than using wormholes/jump gates/warp drive) then you can probably get away with just rendering the largest scene once on entering the system. Secondly, unless you plan on allowing time advance etc, you can get away with only redrawing the middle detail level once every few minutes/hours game time. This will bring your frame rates back up on most frames. Unfortunatly it's about the best we can hope to do with the current hardware, even this will only get you a resolution of 1 meter or so on the lowest performing graphics cards, which could make docking sequences interesting.
HTH Jeremy -- Homepage: http://www.computerbooth.com/ Codepage: http://www.newdawnsoftware.com/ =========================================================================== To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "signoff JAVA3D-INTEREST". For general help, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "help".
