exfret wrote:You could also have an option of "crazy accurate," "reasonably accurate," and "just a guess." Crazy accurate would be like KSP (I assume, but I've never played KSP), reasonably accurate would be KSP plus some simplifications/assumptions/rounding, and just a guess would be what the simulator does now (which I assume is plotting the trajectory based on everything's current position).
Interesting - agreed. Right now auto does this work for you, jumping between the accuracies depending on how many planets there are. But, indeed, 'custom' is daunting, so why not have a few presets people can choose from. I'll play around with this.
I'm also exploring tweaks to the orbit lines. I've been planning to add a setting with medium-length lines (that disappear after a set amount of time, so the planets have trails as they move). But, in doing so, I realized there are a bunch of ways to speed up the drawings. The simplest is just to draw points each time-step instead of full lines. I realized this could be a nice setting for either stylistic preference... or when you've got a bunch of stuff on the screen.
wtg62 wrote:If the game is paused, it would be easy for GSim predict trajectories like that.
So if paused, use KSP-like prediction. If unpaused, use current behavior.
Users could force the game to use the KSP style trajectory prediction via an option, regardless of the paused state.
I'll give it a shot and see how performance/accuracy fare. Paused vs. Unpaused would only help a little bit, though, since the sim would have to recalculate the prediction each moment, anyway. (Though of course you save on the fact that the sim doesn't have much else to do when it's paused). It'd have to recalculate, since any small change in velocity of your flung planet would affect the future.