P0-P-172: Part 146: Infinite Universe

I have more or less finished with the Infinite Universe system for now. It works well, and what I have also discovered is that I can render all of the elements from the system using large values for size and position.

This will make it a lot easier to place these objects within a large solar-system sized view area.

I will need to modify my scaling and placement algorithm at some point in the near future, since at the moment it only places small objects close to the player (such as asteroids, etc). To add large objects like stars, supernovae, etc, I will need to expand my Zone-based system to about the size of a solar system, and then place the objects within it. I may need to scale the objects based on distance, if I run into precision issues, and I may also need to add some LOD optimisations to make sure that I don’t waste time creating small objects if they are too far away to be seen.

I should be able to create  a seamless environment by doing this, because even though I am generating new objects per zone, this is happening in the background as the player travels, there are no “load zones”, so the player could travel in a straight line for as long as they wanted, and the system would imperceptibly populate and load the zones in front of them and unload the objects from the zones behind.