ID:102842
 
In my last post, I gave a model Solar System as a download, to show how the new isometric solar system in moving action (a feature I never actually intended originally, see that last post for details).

http://www.byond.com/games/Acebloke/Dreamland

Today, I've added an extra notch. Another level I didn't intend to do originally is a Planetary System map for each Planet. Clicking on a planet or its moon(s) in the Solar System map will take you to the next level down, showing all the moons (including those not included at the level above; this is because there is simply far too many to include at that level) rotating around it in a similar way.

You can get back to the Solar System by clicking the Planet in the middle. You might notice that Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus doesn't have their moons added yet, this is because they are simply too many for me to do by hand quickly, they'll have to wait for another day when I've finally added in save/load features that will make developing the real-world solar maps so much easier. Today I've just had fun reading wikipedia and getting a sense of distance and size needed. Its not accurately presented in this version, but testing I've done today should help future versions.

Finally, I've added a timescale changer. At the moment, the default is 10 days a second. I've added a feature to change this to 1 day a second and then 1 hour a second. This should give you a better perspective of time, especially for the moons. Take note that its only a quick fix for presentation purposes: Each object is moving on its own and will only update to the new timescale once its completed one of its own movements (so you might be waiting for the slower ones to slow down further :p). Because a lot of moons go round their planets so quick, you might not get a true perspective of their speed in relating to other moons because BYOND can only sleep or spawn ticks to a 1/10th of a second. You may need to go as far as the hour setting to break some moons into running in different speeds.

When the game eventually gets released, the timescales will be fixed depending on what stage of the game your at, so when you're just forming your solar system the default timescale in the model will probably be the fastest it'll go, yet when you are developing your species it will slow down to the hour setting.

I now have to get off to bed again, a bit earlier than yesterday too :p