Hi, I see that a few questions have come up regarding the application of my galaxy simulation. So just to eliminate those uncertainties, here goes:
To begin with I just wanted to know fast stars would really move across the screen if one were to fly with Star Trek velocities. This I have already found out. In fact what you see in the show doesn't even come close to reality. I tried moving with a speed of warp 9 (app. 1250 times the speed of light) and the stars would move very slowly (about a pixel per second for the closest ones). Only when I accelerated the time with about a factor 10000 would you get about the effect seen i the show, except the stars weren't blurred into lines (I saw no reason to implement that effect). Then I thought that I would very much like to experience the feeling of exploring the galaxy just like I felt when I saw The Next Generation. And I got the impression that other members of our Star Trek club would also like that. Therefore I set out to see how I could make a game with so much realism that the player would have (almost) limitless freedom of action. For starters I haven't made many definite decisions on how to achieve this. To begin with I just want a star ship in space that can travel up to warp 9 (also I need to be able to accelerate time because otherwise a trip from one star to another would typically take 3 days - no player is that patient or has so much Earl Grey to drink). Working in a Star Trek like universe has some advantages applicable to the clipping problem: * The galaxy is outward limited by a The Galactic Barrier so there is no need to worry about the ship leaving the galaxy lest it be destroyed. * The core of the galaxy (15000 LY diameter) is protected by The Great Barrier so I don't have to worry about rendering a very dense volume of stars. * The galaxy is divided into well-defined subsections, which makes it possible to only construct star systems for volumes that the player has visited and to only render stars in the approximate cube that the player occupies plus the 26 adjacent cubes. Currently I work with so-called Sector Blocks which are 100x100 LY and contain 5x5x4=100 Sectors with about 40 stars in each sector. I may have to work with Sectors as the before-mentioned cube unit if the system cannot handle 26x4000 stars at a time. I am still experimenting with ways to do this based on the input I received from this list. In my very first e-mail I mentioned that I was just starting to use Java3D so therefore my different attempts take some time as I have to find examples (primarily from the tutorials) for most things that I want to try. But I intend to report back to the list about my conclusions when I find them. I suspect that other people may also have trouble with the very limited way clipping works (this is no slash at Java3D, since it is a hardware issue). I think that now I have answered all the questions that have come up except one: Whether jumps occur? That is a definite possibility. In the Star Trek universe there exists at least one stable worm hole. I would like to point out that this project is for my own leisure and is only really serious in that it is a way for me to better my Java knowledge. If you have had the stomach for the entire above text, I feel that it is only fair that I mention that this list is one of the nicest list that I have ever subscribed to: People talk nice, posts make sense and are written in a proper English and last but not least: Questions are taken seriously and are being answered. Thanks. Regards /Jørn =========================================================================== 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".
