February 13, 2011

More Galaxy/Universe Building

I realized that my cluster galaxy algorithm only lets me make roughly spherical galaxies--where's the fun in that?  I'm going to tweak it a bit to let me generate elliptical galaxies as well, following math here for a 2D ellipse, then creating a random (appropriately scaled) projection along the z-axis to add a 3rd dimension.  I'll probably have to collision check all the stars, so it might take a bit longer, but it's worth a shot.

Other than that, I've been hacking away at the universe creation routine.  This is the thing that makes the galaxy--and actually, it now makes multiple galaxies!  I figured that while a 10,000 star galaxy is unwieldy in 3D (issues with seeing into it, navigating around, etc.), 10 galaxies with 1,000 stars each could be quite manageable if they're separated enough.  I just need to figure out a good way to randomly arrange them--will work on that tomorrow if I have time after work.

Biggest annoyance today: the Java Vector3f class doesn't seem to have a rotate() method or anything like that.  Have to do it all "by hand."

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