Sorry your browser is not supported!

I'm working on little project working with orbital mechanics using the Earth and moon. I've set the scale so one game unit is 10 meters. So the earth being around 12756 km in diameter is sphere with a radius of 1275600 game units. This worked out pretty well, and I got a ship on there, added some calculations for gravity etc and all is well (note I move the planet as opposed to the ship to avoid the floating point "shakes").

So I decided to add the moon in. Scaled it up the same way etc. When I place it near the earth in the scene all appears as it should (scale wise).. but when I go to put the moon at it's rightful distance - 384401 km = 38440100 game units... it just looks totally tiny. Like 10 or 20 pixel speck. I assume it should look like it does from earth.

I'm trying to decided if what the camera renders just isn't the same as how things look in reality, or if perhaps the large values are just messing with it somehow.. or something else is off.

Thanks for any in-site or suggestions.

Example? When viewed from Earth the moon is tiny, try looking at it in Celestia from different angles and compare the apparent radius in that to your game, using the same FOV.

Good plan. That's a resource I should have thought of. I'll check it out and report back.

Thanks dark coder! It does have to do with the FOV... I hadn't realized that it would affect the view that way. It looks like DarkGDK defaults to 90deg.. in Celestia, if I switch the FOV to 90 it looks the same.

Puzzle solved. And on top of that I now realize the Celestia is just a cool ass program.