* Obviously the different renderings would have to applied in a certain order. Can that be controlled?
the best bet would probably to use mixed mode rendering, and update the background if/when needed between frames
* When every view is rendered except for the first, it would have to be applied to the previous image with the background colour (black) as transparent. Could one use an offline canvas for this?
I would suggest rendering the highest scale views on off screen canvases and then applying them to a background node
* Is Java3D smart enough to recognise that each view has the same transform and only the clipping changes and avoid a 1:N increase in rendering time (N being number of layers or clipping regions used).
not that I know of, i'd use three branch groups for this, one at each scale, the largest scale would only know about stars, the middle scale would only know about the local star( or stars for binary systems) and their planets, and the smallest scene would only know about ships, that way you only render each object once, but you still have to do 3 renders.
* By Jeremy's suggestion I could delay rendering of distant objects and use the previous rendering as a background, but to do that I would have to somehow project the whole world (the infinity sphere) onto something that could be used as a background. Is that really possible and how?
use a cube that fits inside a 1 unit sphere. capture 6 shots, one looking up, one forwards, one down, one back, one left, one right, and then place them as textures on the cube, background colour is then irrelevant. Alternatively, you could just render a view onto a background image, but then you have to update it every frame. Rendering to the cube does mean you need 6 images, but you can then view it from any angle and it will look ok. You can do the rendering of the images for the background cubes during the hyperspace/jump/whatever, they should be fast to render.
I've not actually tried the three view approach, but I've though a fair bit about it for my game. I'm still not far enough along with lots of other things (like efficient network comms) etc, to try it, but it should be ok in theory :)
Jeremy
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