Celestial body

Celestial bodies in KSA consist of various stars, planets, moons, and perhaps other space objects. Presently, the game is being built using the real world solar system as a default to establish more foundational functionality. Eventually, the game will feature a new, custom star system (likely developed by a paid community team rather than Rocketwerkz itself) (link).

Rendering

At long distances, celestial bodies like stars, planets, and moons will be rendered as sprites to achieve high levels of performance and clarity.(link) (link) This is in contrast to the skybox texture used in Kerbal Space Program, which showed blurry stars when examined closely. As objects get closer to the camera, the following mode progression takes place (link):

Sprite. A "best guess" of how to draw a sprite is made, roughly how it was before. This makes celestial objects more visible, generally, than they would be in real life. This is a point drawn using PSF glow.

Sprite<->Distant Sphere. As you get closer, once the objects real size would represent more than a pixel, we start drawing the sphere - but with no shadow and using emissive. This begins to blend the actual color data into the sprite

Emissive Distant Sphere. At a few pixels of actual size of the object, we have scaled the sprite fully down so it doesn't show, but transitioned to an unlit sphere that is drawing the color in emissive. This helps avoid the black shadows being draw on the sprite while transitioning from sprite to sphere

Lit Distant Sphere. As we get closer still, the emission begins scaling down towards being a lit distant sphere

Spherical Billboard. Once we are very close, we begin rendering with a spherical billboard

Sprites will have the ability to appear "shadowed", which will enable better representation of gas giant moon systems (link).

Celestial info

Each celestial body has a toggle-able window that displays all of its information and real time statistics.

Physical properties

• Class
• Radius
• Mass
• Sphere of influence
• Axial tilt
• Axial alignment
• Retrograde
• Atmosphere
• Atmosphere height

Orbital properties

• True anomaly
• Semi major axis
• Semi minor axis
• Orbital period
• Inclination
• Eccentricity
• Longitude of ascending node (LAN)
• Argument of periapsis (AoP)
• Periapsis
• Apoapsis
• Orbital speed
• Time at periapsis
• Time since periapsis
• Period

Three drop down menus can display the body's local position, orbital velocity, and rotation in the X, Y, and Z dimensions. The toggle boxes display the body's axes (orthogonal pairs for true and axial) and sphere of influence.