[Ennea]

Since to-scale solar systems are mentioned in the article, it may be worth talking briefly about Outer Wilds. Outer Wilds is a wonderful game built in Unity and comes with its own solar system. Things are quite a bit smaller than in the real world, but I suppose everything is still large enough for floating point precision to be a potential issue. The developers have solved this by making the player the origin instead. Everything else is constantly shifted around to accommodate for the fact that the player is at the center. This works perfectly in normal gameplay, and is only noticeable when flying away a great distance from the game's solar system (nothing's stopping you), at which point you will see the planets and other astral bodies jiggling around on the map.

[JoshTriplett]

Outer Wilds can also suffer from issues with simulation precision if you run the solar-system simulation long enough. The developers have talked about this a bit, and people have observed the effects with mods that encourage long-term exploration. This isn't actually an issue in practical gameplay, though.

rot13 to avoid spoilers for people who haven't played the game: Gur fha tbrf abin va gjragl-gjb zvahgrf, fb guvf vfa'g npghnyyl na vffhr va cenpgvpr.

[jrootabega]

I beat the game, but I believe you can experience precision issues if you just zoom the map out far enough and/or fly far enough away from the sun. Makes sense if you can infer that the map was really just an alternate camera showing the entire scene. It doesn't matter where the origin is if you can see all of it at once.

EVE Online had (still has?) a similar issue with its camera being able to zoom in on objects that are very far away. Normally, at those distances, you'd be using your overview or the HUD markers, but if you did zoom in on a far object, the origin would still be on your ship (or maybe the center of the area you were in), and the object would get distorted. Especially fun when it was a floating corpse.

[automatic6131]

>The developers have solved this by making the player the origin instead

Perhaps such a brilliant idea came to them in a dream. But maybe they forgot how they did it in another dream.

[sigmoid10]

This is actually a pretty common practice and has been used for a long time. Here is a great explanation by developers of Kerbal Space Program, who built a solar system sized physics sandbox using the same method (and a few other tricks) in Unity: https://youtube.com/watch?v=mXTxQko-JH0

[oneoff786]

Good luck doing networked multiplayer for that setup though

[capableweb]

Neither the submission article nor Outer Wilds is about multiplayer, nor does every game need multiplayer. So seems fine enough for many cases, not just the case you are thinking about I guess.

[oneoff786]

I don’t feel that needed to be stated personally. That’s true of pretty much anything.

[TrevorJ]

It's actually not a big problem in many cases. If you need to physically interact with something that's N number of miles away from you then yes it could be an issue.