placement of stars... Galactic Coords, or Right Ascension and Inclination?

4x game, set in the near future.. I want 440ish stars, eventually, but for starters I'm only using 50 (and most are Red Dwarfs)

So, my question is..

should I place my stars like so?
Right Ascension and Declination: 18h49m49.437s, -23°50'10.81" (epoch 2000.0)
meaning, I would Create a gameobject, put my star model under there in the hierarchy, under a couple of pivots... each pivot would correspond to a public variable in the Star's script.. so, I would move 1 pivot to to the RA, and the second to the Inclination.. (I'd use 2 just to keep it simpler for me.. )

Or, by using a 3-space location in the Star's script?
Celestial (X,Y,Z) coordinates in ly: 1.912, -8.658, -3.917
Galactic (X,Y,Z) coordinates in ly: 9.321, 1.925, -1.831
my plan would be to make the stars unit size 1, and multiply that XYZ distance by 1000.. I havnt' tested that to see if that scale will look good or not.


say the scope of my game is 500 years... .

do I need to include stellar movement in so short a time? (armchair astronomer) would any star move more than a light year in that time... my guess is no, that steller motion can be left out of the scope of the game. I mean, I have the info, and I could include it in the script, if I use it or not.. (maybe I should include it in the script just for flavor for the player to read in the game interface/info tabs?)

other than that, I can see no reason not to use Galactic or Celestial (one is centered around Earth, the other around SagA, I think.) coordinates, seeing as I think that would be simpler to implement. (but I'm not a math person, so couldn't say which is better to use)

http://www.stellar-database.com/Scripts/search_star.exe?ID=130600


I think the best job of "stellar cartography" in a game has been Nexus; the Jupiter Incident.. anyone got some examples of a really nice job doing a star-map in 3d..(that one Star Trek movie comes to mind)

 

Wow, this sounds fun. I have a simple database based approach -- I include SQLLite and the database then generate the geometry at runtime. The database I found had RA and Dec values so that's what I'm using. I'm only using it for star identification and constellation drawing (which I'm doing with Vectrosity). The player stays near Sol atm so not quite the same need as you. Obviously for me that means specifying a radius and generating a 'celestial sphere' which I keep centred on the player.

I have toyed with creating a more 'true' 3D model so this is hopefully gonna be an interesting discussion to inform that!

Happy to discuss more

 

ok... so much research later.. (on using Jacob Lane's awesome Star Creation tools.. basically he did what I was going to, and barring further reading of his eula on wether or not I can use it, or use it as inspiration to recreate it... but really nice really nice, I could modify it to be perfect for me, but like I said, I still gotta find a moment sober and collected to read all the fine print)

And, I gotta writer it down, so I will remember it, but Galactic and Celestial Star Co-ordinates... I gotta remember that Galactic cords are centered around the Sun, and Celestial cords are centered around a mythical Celestial Sphere (did Tycho say that there are "no spheres in the Heavens?".. so I'm gonna take that as an endorsement to use "galactic cords" and I gotta mention that somewhere so I can keep it straight while I'm looking at all these numbers.

(did I mention that Jacob's awesome star tools allow me to punch in the B-V value for the Star I'm mapping and if I can get all the scripts to work together right will automatically assign the star the correct colors... so, really hapy about how powerful a tool that is.

(after thinking about it.. I'm still really undecided if RA and Declination or Galactic Cords are better for starplacement... I should go visit a spacegrognard Discord page and ask there, but I'm 99% sure that there are armchair space-generals here on the Unity forums as well)

I wont talk about scale... because I already started a different thread on that one.. but making the stars large enough to be seen, and yet give the player a sence of the distances between stars.. well, I'm working on that design problem too

 

Anyway, here is what I ended up with, it's super basic.. just 5 stars, placed where they should be (I gotta re-check Ross 154, since it doesn't look where I expected it to be.. and usualy problems, one of the billboards has got the wrong value.)

but this is gonna be a "system" for my realistic space dream-game... Because I think that there are some people who would be interested in a "realistic depiction of space exploration and combat...

Unity is so great.. I got this working on my laptop, I then just creat a custom asset pack with all of this stuff in it, and put that on dropbox, a few mins later, I can port it over to the working "work" version of my game

anyway, anyone who is curious, here is what I ended up with, in a Unity executable in a zip file (the cube in the center is scale 1,1,1, so I can judge what scale works best...)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/6o64l9vtw4ylfyk/starmap.zip?dl=0
it should be up on dropbox for a few days, until I need to clear out all the test builds to make space.


and a link to what I'm working on in general, if anyone has any advice on stuff
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/7cqxd1afm2hz4p1/AAAZgpAIRQt3AtHftCrdUpola?dl=0


Nice, I just realized that after placing 5 stars, I'm like 10% done towards my "alpha" goal of having the nearest 44 stars in place (minus the Red Dwarfs)

 

Hello, just stumbled on this and realised it is an old thread, but I am working along this line and wondering if you it still possible to see ghow you got the scaling working (galactical or xyz coord) Thanks.

 

Do you have a new link to the project?Regards.

 

RA and Dec only work for stars that lie on the surface of a sphere. So, basically from a fixed viewpoint at the center. If you actually move around in space they do not adequately represent the stars position. They lack a distance value.

Therefore if you do any appreciable movement relative to the stars you need 3d coordinates. But if they are just shown on a skybox at infinite distance, RA and Dec suffice.