Strange oscillations

What did you draw?
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testtubegames
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Re: Strange oscillations

Post by testtubegames »

Changing the number of calculations-per-frame based on the situation? I think that could work.

I did try this way back in the day -- not entirely successfully, though. Every time a planet got close to a star, it would slow the game to a crawl... which was no good. Better, I figured, to let the planet just die (zoom off / crash into the star). But that was years ago -- I imagine I could get it to work better this time. Maybe add it in as an optional mode (exchanging a {possible} occasional slowdown of the simulation for higher accuracy).

That's an interesting idea about an ultra-slow mode on the simulator. I really liked people's ideas of playing with the timing (a rewind button, slow - medium - fast speeds)... but ultra-slow could be neat. You can see a (only mildly im-)perfect orbit, calculations are done with very high precision. Bullet time for planets. I'm in.
exfret
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Re: Video Mode

Post by exfret »

robly18 wrote:
A Random Player wrote:That would increase the frame rate (erm.. no... well... it wouldn't lag the rest of the computer at least), but not the accuracy of the computations.
I think he means a way to decrease how big the frames are, to increase accuracy.
Erm... No, I just meant to increase or decrease the rate of the frames coming onto your screen. Basically, just to have it so that if the planet's going super-fast, you can slow down the frame-rate to watch it go slower (at the expense of less fps, or maybe the lessened time constraints could be used to increase the fps back up, so it just slows down the simulation).
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testtubegames
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Re: Video Mode

Post by testtubegames »

exfret wrote:
robly18 wrote:
A Random Player wrote:That would increase the frame rate (erm.. no... well... it wouldn't lag the rest of the computer at least), but not the accuracy of the computations.
I think he means a way to decrease how big the frames are, to increase accuracy.
Erm... No, I just meant to increase or decrease the rate of the frames coming onto your screen. Basically, just to have it so that if the planet's going super-fast, you can slow down the frame-rate to watch it go slower (at the expense of less fps, or maybe the lessened time constraints could be used to increase the fps back up, so it just slows down the simulation).
Ah, so the calculations wouldn't get any more precise, you'd just be able to see the planet as less of a blur? That'd be possible. It would jump from spot to spot, like slowly going through a bunch of pictures of different states. Though, if we were to slow it all down like that, would there be any reason not to improve the calculations, too? By that I mean --

Suppose 'one day' in the simulated world passes in 'one second' for us watching on the computer. And the simulator makes, lets say, 30 pictures of the state that second. We could slow it down without adding any more pictures... so we'd see the 30 states over the course of 10 seconds, say. But my sense would be to keep refreshing the picture 30 times per second... meaning when we slowed it all down we'd watch that 'one day' in the simulated world pass in 'ten seconds' for us... and witness 300 states. So it'd still move smoothly, like a movie, instead of obviously discrete frames.

Does that make sense?
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Re: Strange oscillations

Post by exfret »

To have the discrete scenes was what I was suggesting before, and then I realized that it would be more useful just to keep the frame-rate the same, but still decrease the time interval between each frame, which was what my last post was about.
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Re: Strange oscillations

Post by testtubegames »

Cool. Sounds like we're on the same page.
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Re: Strange oscillations

Post by exfret »

testtubegames wrote:Cool. Sounds like we're on the same page.
Yes, we are indeed.
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