Dev Diary 023: Procedurating Solar Systems
Sparkles!The ol' dev diary has been quiet lately as I had some very tough times getting over the next hump of my gravity game. By the way, how does "Outlaws of Gravity" strike you as a title? Little play on "Law of Gravity." But, anyway, I've been busy trying to make a system for procedurally generating the solar system, giving you a random distribution of planets and moons. Of course, later on I'll add some different textures for the planets, so that they don't all look the same.
I had a really tough time with the moons. I don't want them to be smashing into planets or each other, so I had to keep spacing out the planet orbits more and more, until finally it just wasn't practical. I went down a dead end of just making them decorative. Didn't like that, so went back to the old way. Finally, decided I just had to limit the number of them. I originally wanted three as the max, but just wasn't feasible unless I really went big with the resolution. I'm still not really happy about the moons. I think they're cool, and make it more realistic, but they don't seem to serve much purpose. I guess one strategy could be trying to put your ship right next to one, so that hopefully it might catch a bullet. Other than that, I don't see a point, so I might end up taking them out. IIRC, they didn't have them in gravity wars anyway.
