The Day and Weather systems

The game environments will be controlled by a number of inter-locking engines. Two such engines will control the behaviour of both day/night and the weather. The reason behind creating two different engines rather then the one is that slight changes can be made to one aspect of the game and not have any knock-on effects to other areas.

Day/night engine

A simplistic sounding engine, but theres more to it then simply nigt and day. The engine is designed to also show differing starfields in the night sky, changes areas and shots of the gas giant. To do this it needs to compute gravity of all other objects as well as the gas giant on the moon(game area) - this has the effect of creating an orbit, by which the moon is thraveling through. As well as creating an orbit in which the gas giant is travelling through around the systems star.

As a result the player(s) will be able to walk around the environment in daylight or night, in starfield or in aline with the gas giant and all there is in between as well as the occasional asteriod.

Weather engine

Weather is an complex form to copy, so the weather engine would have to be simple yet seen to be showing thousands of varitions in weather conditions ranging from blizzards to sunny day. In order to meet this demard, the engine will use an [n] number of datatables. Each piece of data showing the poistion of particles. As a result of this, weather patterens can emerge, and from that new particle positions come about from which a different weather patteren emerges and so on. The result of this is an ever changing evironment.