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[ZeosPantera]

I was having a discussion with some friends about outerra.. Got on to view distance and I stated it is probably able to render the stars in their right place. The closest star is roughly 42 trillion kilometers away. I know that there is a 2.2billion KM "limit" and that can be exceeded with a gentle loss of resolution but is it possible/feasible to actually place the stars in their right spots?

[cameni]

The limit is just for earth-fixed reference frame, if we made a space simulator we would of course switched the frame in space, able to cover the whole universe.

The stars as rendered now come from a database of stars and are rendered in their real positions on the sky. What will be needed is a better way of rendering their different magnitudes - since our displays cannot render the range of light intensities, it's usually being faked with various halos around the bright stars etc.

[ZeosPantera]

Hrm.. So in theory if I flew FAR away from earth in the current revision of Outerra eventually the stars would change position and distort the constellations and such?

[cameni]

Actually no, because the stars are rendered using their earth-referenced spherical coordinates, but not accounting for the position of the camera. So even if you flew faaar away they would still render in the same constellations, because the renderer neglects your change in position. A proper rendering could be done as there's also a depth information, but I saw no point in it since you can't get that far now and since we are focusing on smaller range of details currently.

[xiong]

wow, and i thought creating was challenging and ambitious

i was wondering how would time be taken into consideration, since what we see in other planets or stars is base on the light travelling from there to our eyes.

creating planets could be done by using the x, y, z coordinates, but what do you do with the time dimension?

[cameni]

Well, even Celestia or Space Engine which were designed as universe viewers do not deal with aging of bodies. Plus they focus on the big picture and don't play with ground level details, because there's only a limited range of details that can be realistically covered and handled with current hardware, with current technology and mainly given the amount of development resources.

In other words, cemeteries are full of overambitious men who didn't manage to finish their work

[Jagerbomber]

ouch. 

[Edding3000]

In other words, cemeteries are full of overambitious men who didn't manage to finish their work

This one im gonna remember....