Orbiter's limits

[HiPotOk1978]

The Big question I would have of course is, when Mr Martin seperates the graphics engine from the back end physics engine, does that mean that you can create your own front end for interacting with your simulated solar system?

If that means you can create your own front end, what would prevent you from creating a front end that allows you to make TCP connections to it. And of course we see where this is going... You host a solar system on a server, people connect to it... Front End to talk to Martin's software could do all sorts of stuff from allowing people to travel together, to calculating the time delay for voice conversation, the Oort Clouds the limit!!!

 

[Belisarius]

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 ,

There is an addon which already does it, it's called Multi-Solar-Systems-Something or MSSS for short. I like it, and I use it for my Sci-Fi version of Orbiter. Check it out...

http://orbithangar.com/advsearch.ph...uthor=default&category=default&subcat=default

 

[Kurt M. Weber]

QUOTING RisingFury
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

I think the idea here is that many people (myself included) can see Orbiter filling a niche as a general-purpose world simulator.

MSFS, as well as the program you mentioned, are all targeted at simulating one particular action: a specific mode of transport.

But by actually simulating the physics, rather than using lookup tables to say "when conditions are X, Y will happen" (which is essentially what MSFS does, internally), Orbiter has the potential to be used as a simulation--and possiby even professional R&D---platform for any number of real-world activities, especially for transport.

The one thing really holding it back is realistic water. Multi-modal transport is already possible with Orbiter--it's targeted towards space, but it's trivial (and common) to include aircraft and ground vehicles now because its simulation is so comprehensive. The one thing it doesn't have is hydrodynamics.

Besides, haven't you ever heard of a splashdown?

 

[-Pv-]

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

Text messaging is driving some of this.

Long Live Orbiter.
-Pv-

 

[Hielor]

First off, nice thread necro.

Secondly:

The one thing really holding it back is realistic water. Multi-modal transport is already possible with Orbiter--it's targeted towards space, but it's trivial (and common) to include aircraft and ground vehicles now because its simulation is so comprehensive. The one thing it doesn't have is hydrodynamics.

Not really. The amount of work to do for a realistic aircraft or ground vehicle is actually nontrivial, since rockets are the only form of propulsion supported directly by the sim. If you want anything else, you need to program it from scratch yourself.

 

[MattNW]

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...

There are a few asteroid objects floating (pun intentional ) around. A fully populated or even minimally populated asteroid belt would have Orbiter loading time up into the hours if not days. The Earth is 93,000,000 miles from the sun. The asteroid belt starts past the orbit of Mars and goes to the orbit of Jupiter. Spread that all around the Sun and you have a whole whole lot of space to fill up. Imagine millions of meshes plus millions of textures. What we would need is an autogen way of loading asteroids. You could then put meshed asteroids in for the larger asteroids.

Of course flying through an asteroid belt is not what it's made to be in movies. They always show asteroids bouncing off each other. In reality if you landed on one asteroid you would need a pretty good telescope to see the nearest asteroids to yours. It would be unbelievably easy to fly though. Asteroids don't get close enough together to be a real navigation hazard. Look at all the probes they send to the outer planets. None have encountered an asteroid except at a great distance.

 

[tblaxland]

Piper's [ame="http://www.orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=1436"]MPC Database Viewer/Exporter[/ame] is very good for adding asteroids to Orbiter. Just add the ones you want to travel to (to keeping loading times down) since you won't see any others anyway.

 

[Artlav]

Asteroid belt is a statistical object, and i don't think there are accurate orbits for majority of rocks out there or desire by players to have most of them exactly in the proper orbits.

That means simply that you can have as much asteroids as you like - millions, less or more - put in there dynamically. All that is needed is a fractal function to determine a probability of an asteroid presence on a given trajectory spanning the area and make one up in-flight when the area is approached, instead of "millions of meshes plus millions of textures". That certainly is only doable from inside the Orbiter core though. Probably.

 

[2552]

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 lot of addons already don't work in beta versions, so the API is already incompatible.

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.

Maybe instead of using one set of sun-relative coordinates for everything, you could divide the orbiter "universe" into smaller areas (cubes, 1AU in size), and keep track of ships by which area they are in, and the coordinates within that area. This could possibly allow a space the size of the universe to be flown through with no loss of accuracy. The only limit would be the number of cubes you could fit in the double data type (or long double).

A simpler way of doing this would be to keep two sets of coordinates for every ship; one an integer in AU, relative to the sun, and the second in meters, relative to the first set of coordinates. When the distance to the sun in one axis (x) goes from 1AU to 2AU, increment the x in the first set of coordinates to 2AU, and reset the x in the second set second set to 0 meters.

 

[Ajaja]

I would like to see nonspherical planets. For gas giants (especially Saturn) sphere is too rough approximation

 

[Hielor]

I would like to see nonspherical planets. For gas giants (especially Saturn) sphere is too rough approximation

I'm fairly sure that Orbiter models oblatitude.

 

[tblaxland]

I'm fairly sure that Orbiter models oblatitude.

For the gravity field, yes, but I don't believe that affects the visuals.

 

[Urwumpe]

For the gravity field, yes, but I don't believe that affects the visuals.

At least not the difference between radius and altitude. The planets are geometrically spherical.

 

[Kaito]

aahh, feels good to start up my rusty old orbiter again. Although the approach to Cape Canaveral at 80 degrees wasn't to fun...


ANYWAY, on topic. I PERSONALLY think the limits of orbiter are what the community makes it to be. I mean, worst case scenario, if Dr. Martin decided to not develop Orbiter anymore, and kept the source code to himself, people would develop add-ons to expand orbiter, such as the addition of General Relativity physics. So, the possibilities are endless.

Well, the possibilities go only as far as your computer can handle...

 

[destinos]

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.

It's true. I started looking for something like Orbiter during all the coverage of the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11. The first thing I found was this: http://lander.dunnbypaul.net/

And the second was Orbiter.

 

[Donamy]

It's true. I started looking for something like Orbiter during all the coverage of the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11. The first thing I found was this: http://lander.dunnbypaul.net/

And the second was Orbiter.

Addicting.

 

[Quix0r]

Hyperspace or warp drive?

An all-in-one simulation, a "general reality simulation" or so? Next to impossible in my view. Of course, you can try to implement interstellar travel, but that requires a lot hard drive space plus RAM plus CPU power plus GPU power - hard drive space for all that textures and meshes. Or do you have a 16 core system with a 4 head GPU standing around somewhere?

How does space in general/total work? Do you really want to simulate this?

I mean, stay safely on ground with both feeds and look what you already got with Orbiter:
- leaving a planet (gravity plays a huge role)
- docking on stations
- flying interplanetary (e.g. to Mars or moon)
- landing on planets again

For accomplishing interstellar travel, even Star Trek / Star Wars spacecrafts have some kind of "warp drive" or hyperspace drive because else (as mentioned before) it would take several thousands of years to travel only one direction (in Orbiter, too?). This might be interesting to add (if not yet added).

BTW: How is that warp drive implemented in the Star Trek Addon?

But that is to much futuristic to be added to a "Generic Space Simulation" - Orbiter is generic in my view, it a "simulation engine". In my discretion interstellar travel should stay in addons.

Just my two cents.

 

[n72.75]

For accomplishing interstellar travel, even Star Trek / Star Wars spacecrafts have some kind of "warp drive" or hyperspace drive because else (as mentioned before) it would take several thousands of years to travel only one direction (in Orbiter, too?). This might be interesting to add (if not yet added).

You would not need to add warp drive.

From your perspective, you would observe acceleration to be unperturbed by relativity, however outside observers would observe you only approaching the speed of light at an asymptote.

 

[Urwumpe]

One problem you will always get with warp drives&co: They are terribly contradictory in their own worlds. Take for example Star Trek itself, which had almost one change of the canon behind the warp drive per season. It is a fictional plot device, no physical theory that you can make work according to known set rules - I recommend watching Galaxy Quest a few times before thinking about this topic.

That doesn't mean that orbiter does not allow them - Orbiter only cares about Newtonian physics, we have yet not even special relativity. But you would get the same results without much ado by using the scenario editor.

Also, I think personally, interstellar spaceflight and warp drives are boring. Really boring. Maybe appealing for people haven't done proper interplanetary travel yet. Of course the universe around us is large. But that applies to the solar system as well. The solar system is a large ocean with tiny moving islands. With gravity being what the winds and currents had been for the sailors of the past. Plotting a course through the solar system can be simple, but if you have done it often enough,you will find tricks to improve your flight time. That you can even get a few weeks faster to Jupiter with the same amount of fuel, if you can use the Galilean moons for bleeding speed. Knowing how many possibilities you have in the trajectory from A to B is what makes Orbiter fun. Even getting to Venus has more than just one way to do it.

Also Orbiters numeric limits aren't that bad for a real-time simulation, you can even do WSB trajectories in Orbiter as in the real world. And the reproduction of the LCROSS mission also worked out pretty well, since it put LCROSS right into NASAs numeric predictions of the impact area.

What is IMHO more missing than a warp drive is an incentive to make players excel. There are far too many missions and these are often single episodes and not part of a bigger program.

 

[Bj]

But you would get the same results without much ado by using the scenario editor.

Or you could run into the Sun, or into a planet at high speed, or [ame="http://www.orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=2297"]WarpDrive MFD[/ame]...

Also, I think personally, interstellar spaceflight and warp drives are boring. Really boring. Maybe appealing for people haven't done proper interplanetary travel yet. Of course the universe around us is large. But that applies to the solar system as well.

If faster than light was possible, it would open up a much bigger area to explore. If fast as light was possible, someone could be in Pluto's SOI in 5 hours give or take.

Or even could cross to the center of the milky way in ~25 years if 100x speed of light was available. With that kind of potential it would be, in my opinion, much less boring. Since for the most part, most on going missions to space are in LEO.