The workaround to model an entire miniaturized solar system was to make everything in the engine very, very small
They're hard to find now, and I'm sure the oldest ones are gone forever, but HarvesteR from the original Kerbal Space Program dev team had a series of blogs about all of the custom code he had to add to Unity to make that game work. Here's one and here's another. The tl;dr was that going big introduces rounding errors which get worse the bigger you go, and the solutions included replacing the solar system with 1:6000 scale models until you actually needed a full-size planet, and moving the whole universe around the player (insteadd of moving the player through the universe) in order to keep gameplay near the origin and therefore keep rounding errors small and unnoticeable.
and moving the whole universe around the player (insteadd of moving the player through the universe) in order to keep gameplay near the origin and therefore keep rounding errors small and unnoticeable.
They're hard to find now, and I'm sure the oldest ones are gone forever, but HarvesteR from the original Kerbal Space Program dev team had a series of blogs about all of the custom code he had to add to Unity to make that game work. Here's one and here's another. The tl;dr was that going big introduces rounding errors which get worse the bigger you go, and the solutions included replacing the solar system with 1:6000 scale models until you actually needed a full-size planet, and moving the whole universe around the player (insteadd of moving the player through the universe) in order to keep gameplay near the origin and therefore keep rounding errors small and unnoticeable.
Building the virtual equivalent of an Alcubierre Drive so I can simulate launching a rocket to the moon.
hey, i remember that episode of futurama