- #1
dylankarr.com
- 13
- 0
Hi,
I'm an indie game developer working on a free online puzzle/simulation game set in space. The object of the game is to move, resize, push, pull and otherwise manipulate celestial bodies to solve problems, like putting a planet in a stable orbit or accelerating a satellite to near lightspeed. I want the game to be at least slightly educational and therefore somewhat scientifically accurate. The only problem is that this game is designed to work in web browsers, so there are quite a few processing restraints on how accurate the game's calculations can be, and I need some help creating more approximate, faster equations for modeling planetary and stellar physics.
Currently, I have bodies moving in a classical manner, obeying Newton's law of gravitation by applying a force proportional to its mass and inversely proportional to the square of it's distance to every object within a radius where it's gravitational influence will be significant. I've also given the player the ability to speed and slow time at will and to adjust the mass of objects as well (at a cost of a certain number of points). Players can also 'grab' bodies and move them about in realtime or while paused to affect their trajectories and influence bodies around them.
What I'd like to add is things like Tidal Lock, Frame Dragging, Geodetic effects, and Special Relativity (currently their is no lightspeed limit). The problem is that all of these things require me to account for things like the curvature of spacetime or time-like dimensions, which if you've ever worked with computers in modeling these sorts of things before, you'll probably know them to be a very hard thing for computers to do. I was thinking that because I don't necessarily need my game to be perfectly accurate for my purposes, I might be able to create some sort of classical approximations to these effects to use instead. However, I don't even really know where to start in creating an equation like that, and when I googled it, as far as I could tell, no one else has ever tried. So, basically, I was just wondering if anyone here had any ideas or if someone could even give me a place to start?
I'm an indie game developer working on a free online puzzle/simulation game set in space. The object of the game is to move, resize, push, pull and otherwise manipulate celestial bodies to solve problems, like putting a planet in a stable orbit or accelerating a satellite to near lightspeed. I want the game to be at least slightly educational and therefore somewhat scientifically accurate. The only problem is that this game is designed to work in web browsers, so there are quite a few processing restraints on how accurate the game's calculations can be, and I need some help creating more approximate, faster equations for modeling planetary and stellar physics.
Currently, I have bodies moving in a classical manner, obeying Newton's law of gravitation by applying a force proportional to its mass and inversely proportional to the square of it's distance to every object within a radius where it's gravitational influence will be significant. I've also given the player the ability to speed and slow time at will and to adjust the mass of objects as well (at a cost of a certain number of points). Players can also 'grab' bodies and move them about in realtime or while paused to affect their trajectories and influence bodies around them.
What I'd like to add is things like Tidal Lock, Frame Dragging, Geodetic effects, and Special Relativity (currently their is no lightspeed limit). The problem is that all of these things require me to account for things like the curvature of spacetime or time-like dimensions, which if you've ever worked with computers in modeling these sorts of things before, you'll probably know them to be a very hard thing for computers to do. I was thinking that because I don't necessarily need my game to be perfectly accurate for my purposes, I might be able to create some sort of classical approximations to these effects to use instead. However, I don't even really know where to start in creating an equation like that, and when I googled it, as far as I could tell, no one else has ever tried. So, basically, I was just wondering if anyone here had any ideas or if someone could even give me a place to start?