- It was very tempting to run this doc through a LLM to make sure we don't have too many offset phrasings and typos. But I want to keep this devlog as authentic as I can, which means there will be no use of AI - so do bear with me and my - at times - quirky sentences.
Space Manager
The vision with this project is to build a space management game as realistic as possible while at the same time making sure it is entertaining enough to actually be fun. That is a challenge!
In the game, you will be able to launch from your earth spaceport, sending satellites, telescopes, vessels into orbits or to other moons or planets.
But getting to that point requires knowledge which you must learn throughout the game. First goal will be a successful LEO (Low Earth Orbit) insertion.
This devlog will actively be updated as the development progresses, mainly with technical stories, but probably also with some philosophical reflections every now and then - and most importantly we are very open to ideas and suggestions, so please don't hold back if you have something you would like to see happen - i promise you, that everything will be considered!
Building a solar system - The beginning
If we were to present the solar system in true scale we would end up with a very dull game canvas, that would require a lot of zooming and panning to navigate it.
It wouldn’t really present the actual solar system in a useful way, and would essentially end up looking empty.
So one of the first challenges was to figure out how we can present our solar system in a way that makes it navigable while at the same time giving a correct impression of the distances and planet sizes - but most important of all, staying as true to real as we can..
- Solar system in true scale. What looks like planets are in fact their moons' orbit lines. Even the sun is close to invisible.
One approach to fix this would be to scale up the radius of each planet thus making them bigger so they are visible at all zoom ranges.
However, while this technically makes sense, we would need to scale each planet significantly, which would cause the sun to consume Mercury and Venus, just to have the rest of the planets slightly visible.
Scaling individually would not make sense either since we want to show the solar system as real as we can, and that would make it difficult to see the actual size difference on planets.
Furthermore since we will be using real trajectory and orbital mechanics, scaling would cause moons to cross into other planet systems making them slip their orbits effectively killing the goal of staying true to physics.
- Exaggerated planet scaling of x16. Sun has consumed Mercury and Venus and Earth appears way too close to the sun.
- Example of x40 scaling
So we need a different approach to get to a good compromise between the actual solar system and one that can work on a game canvas - and by now, there's no doubt that it's going to have to be a compromise.
We could scale and normalize the distances between planet orbits, which would bring everything closer together, but by doing that we would end up with a solar system that does not present the differences in orbit distances. For example Earth is fairly close to Mars, but Mars is very far from its other neighboring planet, Jupiter.
We have to make sure that these differences are visually shown.
Enter logarithmic scaling
So to scale down the solar system, while making sure we keep good visual distance differences, a logarithmic scaling approach could be the solution.
This way we dense everything up, and keep a good visual presentation.
- Log scaled solar system. Planets are not scaled, but the entire system is now densed up, making planets visible.
The above is obviously too aggressive, so a better solution could be to keep a log scaling, and at the same time scale planets slightly.
- Log scaled orbits and slightly scaled planets.
And with that, we now have a decent compromise that gives us a fairly correct view of the solar system while at the same time making it easy to navigate.
It does however spawn some new problems, such as visualizing space travel to outer planets.
Since orbits are log scaled, the outer most planets will appear closer while actually not being closer, so a ship travelling from Earth to Neptune will start its journey going fast (visually) and as it progresses it will appear to go slower and slower - but in reality it is maintaining the exact same speed (or close too).
But - while this may seem like an issue, we could also embrace it as a feature…