Today was primarily spent working on the physics engine of the game. The first thing I did was give the spacecraft some more variables like thrust and mass, so we can use physics calculations to give realistic gravity and movement vectors. Later, I implemented the rendering functions for both the earth and moon as well as their respective gravity methods. There were some bugs in how the gravity works as well that I have fixed. Then I realized for some reason that the gravity and movement vectors were a lot more powerful then they were supposed to be. This was due to me applying one second’s gravity and movement vectors instead of one tick’s. One tick in my game is based off the display of the computer which in my case is 1/60th of a second, so it was 60x faster than intended. Another issue encounted includes that my game was significantly laggy when I approached the moon which was the moon’s distance in meters worth of pixels away from earth. I hypothesized that the cause of the lag was the major amount of pixels being loaded, so I scaled down the entire game by a factor of 10 in the distances and scaled the weighted down by a factor of 100 to make the force of gravity the same as SI. Then, I also implemented side thrusters and angular velocity as well as torque and inertia to make turning actual physics instead of just values I determined on the spot which will make more sense for people who are playing my game later. Finally, implemented collision code that stops the game if the spacecraft collides with either the moon or Earth. Thanks for reading! If you guys have any other physics based features that you want me to implement, please comment it down below! I need this project to take more hours :).
