Comment by danhau
5 months ago
Kerbal Space Program required a lot of clever engineering to cram an entire solar system into the constrains of 32 bit floats. There are articles and videos out there, highly recommended!
5 months ago
Kerbal Space Program required a lot of clever engineering to cram an entire solar system into the constrains of 32 bit floats. There are articles and videos out there, highly recommended!
Didn't they just do the normal "The world is centered on you" trick? And then switched to 64 bit coordinates anyway?
That's one of the things, yeah. IIRC they tried 64-bit but gave up on it, one reason being the rendering code was hardwired to 32-bit, so there was no real benefit in the end.
There are other solutions they had to find. The game has two "orbital mechanics engines". One runs a physics simulation and the other is just ellipse math, making the rocket "move on rails". That's why you can't time warp under a certain altitude (that's the real physics simulation).
There are also things in rendering, how they faked the large-scale graphics of Kerbin, involving problems with the depth buffer I believe.