I was wondering how space games such as Eve online scale the graphics. Do they use realistic sizes at all, or is everything scaled down?
The reason I’m asking this is because to render huge objects like planets in say, OpenGL, I’d have to have a huge depth range and then I would still get fuzziness and artifacts etc in the distance.
So how is it done correctly? Thanks.
iirc Eve is low on polygons. Being in space and all you don’t need to draw enviroments or stuff like that. Just a big ball (planet) with a texture on it + a few ship models.
Realistic sizes? Most definitely not. A single space ship would be millions of pixels wide.
Thanks. From tests I did, asteroids that I made to more realistic sizes were clipped at much closer ranges. So it probably is just a case of making everything smaller than it really would be.
As a regular eve player, and someone who did astrophysics. Eve does what every space game should do. Cheat.
Ships are mostly to “scale”, and can be quite high poly. But with LOD and the fact that typically only one ship is close enough to the camera to be polys most of the time, the total poly count is really low compared to many modern games. They aim for quite low end hardware in general.
They cheat with planet sizes and suns and backgrounds. For example i can be 70AU from the local sun, at that distance it would look like a very bright star, not a sun. But they still render it as a fully sized sun. And the results are a much more fun game.