Orbiter's limits

[MJR]

What do you think Orbiter's limits are in the future? Does it have endless opportunities? I was wondering that because of looking back at the other versions, this one was such an upgrade. So much addons are getting made and are extremely incredible to me. I just cannot wait to see how Orbiter will eventually be.

 

[pete.dakota]

What do you think Orbiter's limits are in the future? Does it have endless opportunities? I was wondering that because of looking back at the other versions, this one was such an upgrade. So much addons are getting made and are extremely incredible to me. I just cannot wait to see how Orbiter will eventually be.

In terms of Orbiter as a core program, the next big step will hopefully be the separation of the physics engine from the graphics, which will allow for multi platform support (dx8,9,10. OpenGL) and so, the possibility for visuals that you see in today's modern workhorse games, such as post-processing lighting effects. Outside of that, I suppose it may be possible to make the switch from the current Newtonian Physics (which, unrealistically, allows faster than light travel) to physics and phenomena governed by General Relativity at velocities close to the speed of light, such as time dilation.

The best part for me, is knowing that the addons will keep on coming and coming, and that Orbiter will never die as the community will always be here to take it on if Martin decides it's time.

 

[ryan]

I rekon when Constellation comes around Orbiter might have a boom of Orbitnauts, the same thing happened in the Apollo years every kid had little models and all that, but when Neil stepped on the moon, they watched it for a second and went off.

 

[James.Denholm]

It will be awesome when the Constellation program gets launched (nudge nudge, get the pun, nudge nudge), and you're right, ryan, we will have loads more Orbitnauts, but that can only mean one thing... lots more posts saying stuff like:

lol rofl hlp plz lol lol <INSERT SMILEY SPAM AND BAD SPELLING>

It's going to be quite a wave to ride, fellas. The question is, though, when it comes the time to get on your board, will you get up, or duck under it?

You may have guessed, I actually don't surf. At all.

 

[Urwumpe]

The numerical limits of Orbiter are currently the limits of the double data type - an IEEE standard 64 bit floating point number. Orbiter could use a "long double" (80 bit floating point number) instead, but this would make it's API incompatible to earlier versions quickly.

A floating point number is simply a integer number multiplied by a scaling factor. Like for example 5 * 1/10 for describing 0.5.

At one point far away from the sun, you would get problems with accuracy, as the smallest step possible becomes bigger with growing scaling factors.

 

[YL3GDY]

In the future more and more things can be implemented, almost endlessly (I hope that computers' performance will grow faster than requirements of Orbiter ).
Seriously speaking, I agree with Urwumpe. The first point to upgrade is precision. long double or some larger (e.g., =>32-byte) custom type would be good, but imho it would lower performance a lot. The other way - implementation of Einstein model instead of Newtonian. And, of course, lots of new interesting addons.

 

[Dogsbd]

The limits of what can be accomplished with the current version of Orbiter are far from being reached. Take for instance what Artlav is doing with Meshland and Orulex and the complexity of addons like Ultra Shuttle, NASSP, AMSO and Dan's Delta Glider IV. The opportunities for new addons or to go back and revisit older addons (like Mercury, Gemini, Vostok, Voskhod, Soyuz) and incorporate such complexities in them, are almost endless.

I'd love to see improvements like Urwumpe suggests, along with other solar systems to fly to to take advantage of that increase in accuracy , but we sure have a lot to work with already thanks to Martin and a lot of talented addon developers.

 

[flytandem]

I would like to see more accuracy with TransX. I know this isn't really the question since TransX isn't Orbiter but just an MFD addon. But to be able to visually iterate hypothetical trajectories is to me the best part of Orbiter. After all it's a space flight simulator at heart, not just a means to showcase spacecraft. IMHO.

One can create a beautiful and precise flight trajectory and do a perfect burn only to find out on the flight that the precision of the burn far exceeds TransX ability to precisely predict the trajectory. Wouldn't it be cool if while adjusting TransX, in the background, the physics engine at the core of Orbiter is taking the current hypothetical burn you just clicked in TransX and then runs an integration using the orbiter core and then updates what TransX is thinking with the more correct result of that burn. Without needing to update and drive the graphics, the physics engine would churn away very quickly so perhaps in just a couple of seconds it might update an Earth to Mars flight or maybe in a few more seconds integrate an Earth to Jupiter flight.

 

[MJR]

It will be awesome when the Constellation program gets launched (nudge nudge, get the pun, nudge nudge), and you're right, ryan, we will have loads more Orbitnauts, but that can only mean one thing... lots more posts saying stuff like:

lol rofl hlp plz lol lol <INSERT SMILEY SPAM AND BAD SPELLING>

It's going to be quite a wave to ride, fellas. The question is, though, when it comes the time to get on your board, will you get up, or duck under it?

You may have guessed, I actually don't surf. At all.

I hate it when people talk like that. It gets really annoying. Why not just write the actual words?

 

[Pilot7893]

I would like to see interstellar travel

 

[tblaxland]

Wouldn't it be cool if while adjusting TransX, in the background, the physics engine at the core of Orbiter is taking the current hypothetical burn you just clicked in TransX and then runs an integration using the orbiter core and then updates what TransX is thinking with the more correct result of that burn. Without needing to update and drive the graphics, the physics engine would churn away very quickly so perhaps in just a couple of seconds it might update an Earth to Mars flight or maybe in a few more seconds integrate an Earth to Jupiter flight.

Perhaps this would be possible with with the graphics engine separated from the physics engine, as intended for the next version. In essence you could have two Orbiter-NG threads running - one in real time and displayed by your graphics client, and the other in running hypothetical trajectories in the background and reporting to an MFD in the real time thread. That would perform real nice on a dual core CPU.

 

[Hartmann]

The numerical limits of Orbiter are currently the limits of the double data type - an IEEE standard 64 bit floating point number. Orbiter could use a "long double" (80 bit floating point number) instead, but this would make it's API incompatible to earlier versions quickly.

A floating point number is simply a integer number multiplied by a scaling factor. Like for example 5 * 1/10 for describing 0.5.

At one point far away from the sun, you would get problems with accuracy, as the smallest step possible becomes bigger with growing scaling factors.

It could be solved if at some distance of the sun the sim close the actual simulation and load another with an intermediate screen "Loading"
for example loading a new solar system.

with this way you can save a lot ot TC in an empty space ,

 

[Whatu]

It could be solved if at some distance of the sun the sim close the actual simulation and load another with an intermediate screen "Loading"
for example loading a new solar system.

with this way you can save a lot ot TC in an empty space ,

This seems a good idea to implement hypothetical interstellar trips in the future versions. You aim to a star... get in the cryogenic thing to sleep a few years (or a few hundred), and voilá., your exploring a star. Then back to earth (another hundred years) and find that humanity has vanished because of climatic change... sad.

 

[Piet Barber]

Make Relativity Happen!

Outside of that, I suppose it may be possible to make the switch from the current Newtonian Physics (which, unrealistically, allows faster than light travel) to physics and phenomena governed by General Relativity at velocities close to the speed of light, such as time dilation.

(I think you meant Special Relativity, not General Relativity)

I would really like to see Special Relativity built into the Orbiter Engine;
This of course would mean that all objects would have to have a clock associated with them; one Earth Reference time, and a ship reference time.

• Make the ship's external views squish when approaching c,
• Make the forward view of the stars tunnel-vision and blue shift
• Make time slow down on the Earth clock, but stay the same for the Ship-board clock (Special Relativity contains the concept of a lack of an absolute time frame; but we can pretend that Earth is absolute time. )
• Accelerating to c follows asymptote curve, never get there
• Relativistic Mass

It seems that nobody easily envisions close-to-light relativity; and no simulator/video game ever gets it right. No Sci-fi movies ever get it right either. (With the exception of brief moments of brilliance in StarGate SG-1) It disappoints me that you could tweak the acceleration of any of the ships in this simulator and accelerate past the speed of light.

I don't care much for seeing General Relativity incorporated; I don't plan on flying near black holes, and don't plan on measuring the offset of stars right next to the sun.

I don't think an add-on would allow for these kinds of changes to the way Orbiter behaves. It is my understanding that this would have to happen at the core components of Orbiter.

 

[RisingFury]

I would like to see interstellar travel

It takes light, traveling at 300 000 km/s, 4.6 years to reach the nearest star besides the sun.... your ship travels at a messily few km/s. It would take so long that your UMmu would (forgetting the usual logistical problems like food and life support) die of old age before you got there xD

Not to mention having to wait a whole year at maxed out time acceleration to actually get there.


A more interesting thing tough would be collision detection so modders can write support to damage or destroy your ship on impacts with other ships.


Another thing that comes to mind is a more filled up solar system. Granted, that can be created already... I'm thinking about more stuff then just the sun and planets... I'd like to see comets and the asteroid belt...


Separation of the physics engine and graphics engine would be cool... and plugins for the graphics engine would be good so that Martin can focus on the physics engine and let some of the graphics effects be developed by the community.


A mesh for the sun in addition to the sprite.


More accurate physics and more physical phenomenon.


More accurate planets and atmospheres... Come on! The gas giants don't really have a solid surface, do they?!
Also, I'm talking about real weather. Changes of air temperature, pressure, humidity,... different weather effects ranging from the slightest breeze to category 5 hurricanes (Hey, if you can make the specular reflections, you damn sure as hell can increase the strength of the hurricane over warm waters).
Real clouds... not just a thin layer at what? 7 km altitude?
Clouds that would affect atmospheric flight.
Martian dust storms... swirling clouds of the gas giants with those storms running around...
Topography!!! Mountains, rivers, hills and valeys!
Real water... that your ship can sink in... that would freeze in the winter and thaw in the summer.


Support for other vehicle types, other then space ships. Everything that I've seen so far has the functionality of a space ship. From different MFD's to the HUD. Although people have built rovers and stuff, the propulsion behaves like a rocket engine


Granted, a lot of what I suggested would decrease performance by a lot... but hey, it's not like it's not possible. You can implement a few tricks to increase performance as well as you have to take into account that by the time new orbiter gets released... well, let me just put it this way: Who's gonna fly on a P3 anymore, right?

Given that some addons these days are so graphically complex that even modern computers are struggling with the DX7.

 

[Woo482]

hears some addons for [ame="http://www.orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=2686"]Topography[/ame] and [ame="http://www.orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=2782"]Real clouds[/ame]
(click the blue words)

 

[RisingFury]

Yea... I've also seen some topography for Mars being made. Though I'd really like to see this integrated into the orbiter core itself. I can imagine having some performance benefits that way

Hell... the clouds are being spawned all over the place - as smoke objects

Not to mention the performance hit these two cause. Normally my orbiter is running at 150 FPS. Now it's down to 20.

 

[Jarvitä]

Yea... I've also seen some topography for Mars being made. Though I'd really like to see this integrated into the orbiter core itself. I can imagine having some performance benefits that way

Hell... the clouds are being spawned all over the place - as smoke objects

Not to mention the performance hit these two cause. Normally my orbiter is running at 150 FPS. Now it's down to 20.

That's the beauty of Orbiter, the core itself is a really slim install, and you can customise it in any way you like. I think adding things like meshland, orulex, all the navigation and guidance MFDs etc into the orbiter core would just create unnecessary bloat.

 

[Woo482]

and the new orbiter core is just the physics for the simulator the graphics is completely separate now (there is even a orbiter NG (No graphics) )

 

[hypersonic]

QUOTING RisingFury

"Originally Posted by Pilot7893
I would like to see interstellar travel


It takes light, traveling at 300 000 km/s, 4.6 years to reach the nearest star besides the sun.... your ship travels at a messily few km/s. It would take so long that your UMmu would (forgetting the usual logistical problems like food and life support) die of old age before you got there xD

Not to mention having to wait a whole year at maxed out time acceleration to actually get there. "

SO?

The point made by Pilot7893 is absolutely correct! - it is a natural progression of what IS afterall a SPACE simulator!? - Interstellar travel is 'space' afterall. You issue with time is mute. Orbiter will still allow 'exotic' forms of propulsion to achieve significant velocities approaching 'C' & time dilation will play a part of course. Therefore a 10 year mission at 50% C is not unreasonable.
Afterall the New Horizons probe to Pluto, launched in 2006, won't arrive at Pluto until 2015 - nearly 10 years! - But i dont' hear orbiter fans moaning that simulating New Horizons as being an issue.

"Real water... that your ship can sink in... that would freeze in the winter and thaw in the summer" -

Whats this got to do with space simulation!?? - Put simply, please don't bash someones suggestion, when it clearly IS space orientated, then counter suggest something that has NOTHING to do with Space simulation.
If you want Water, go try Ilan Papini's 'Virtual Sailor'
Cheers
Hyper