Question How does orbiter...

[J_Aerospace]

Hi there i have been learning directx and have managed to draw a sphere with a map of the earth on it how ever i have had to reduce the size of my earth by alot due to the capabilites of the computer (double) to handle large values e.g. a planet and the ship and distancecs between planets how does orbiter over come such things? Allso how does orbiter allow spacecraft to land on the surface of the planet what iam saying does at say set alltitude orbiter load up a new mesh for the surface of the earth?


Thank you for your time...

 

[cjp]

About the size of double it should be enough for rendering earth alone but to increase accuracy Orbiter uses a neat trick explained in this other thread when it comes to actually rendering everything planets ships etc with directx Orbiter needs to use some other tricks because there is a huge range of different distances from very nearby objects like ships to far away like planets so there is this thing called the Z-buffer and Orbiter probably resets it a few times for instance between rendering the planets and rendering vessels by the way did you notice how hard it is to read texts without punctuation?