Victor Ivri wrote:
On Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 6:38 PM, Victor Ivri <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 1:39 PM, Victor Ivri <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Sun, Jul 6, 2008 at 5:15 PM, Tyler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
RFTS implements wrapping with circle-like logic. Basically you just
never travel >50% distance of the universe.
Did you mean wrapping both on the top-bottom and left-right
dimensions? (I can't imagine how you can wrap a circle into a sphere.
Maybe Escher can! :)))
Oh, I read 'circle like' to mean 'sphere like' for some reason. In
that case, is it the donut shape with top-bottom wrap-around, like
nash suggested?
Ok, I played around with it a bit, and it seems as if there is
wrap-around in both top-bottom, and left-right dimensions, so I guess
the question falls off. I'd still like to know what you meant by
'normalized space', though :)
The technical term is a "toroid". If you take a piece of flat paper and
bend it around so top and bottom edges meet, and then wrap the cylinder
around so the ends meet, you get a donut shape - which is a toroid (for
those interested in trivia, my understanding is that the toroid is the
only 3-D shape in which cartesian geometry holds true on its surface,
e.g. the sum of the internal angles of a triangle adding to 180deg. If
you do the same on the surface of a sphere, you get 270deg instead - try
it with a globe of the earth next time! This is why it is hard to
imagine a planar circle wrapped down to a sphere).
Personally, since RFTS has a limited number of stars and fleets can't
change directions, I'd keep some kind of lookup table and just specify
distances between each star. It would save you a lot of calculations!
Normalised simply means that everything is referenced to a particular
arbitrary value. So, an example: the average distance between the earth
and the sun is 148 800 000 km (93 000 000 miles for you Americans). In
solar system astronomy, this is normalised to 1 AU (astronomical unit).
Venus' orbit is roughly half way in from the earth's orbit, so it is
listed as roughly 0.5 AU. Mars at roughly twice the distance is listed
as ~2 AU.
The idea is to make the math easy by eliminating all those pesky 0's -
or to turn floating point math into integer math by having integer
multiples of a floating point value. Since all the normalised values are
referenced back to the same arbitrary value, you effectively divide
every value by that arbitrary value and it disappears from your
equations altogether...
-J
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