[AdmiralAsshat]

Reminds me of a similar story about Blast Corps, specifically how they implemented logic to correctly display apparent retrograde motion vis-a-vis the orbit of Venus from the perspective of Earth...all just for what basically amounts to a background animation. [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZ6eNJi02Qk

[klysm]

This is one of those things where it's like if you have to program them to move, it's probably just easiest to program it to be somewhat faithful instead of making up some other values.

[pipes]

Someone in the YouTube comments claims he was an intern at rare at the time and he was responsible for this. Who knows, they could be lying.

[mywittyname]

To me it feels like one of those escapades we go on when we want to focus on doing some "fun" work.

[rawling]

Isn't this just... they made the planets have the correct orbit times, and retrograde motion just drops out from that?

[gs17]

Yeah, it's impressive that they bothered to animate them with the correct ratio of periods, but it's not like they had to add epicycles.

[QuercusMax]

When I took the sophomore-level Computer Graphics class as an undergrad in 2001, the final project was to build a solar system simulator in OpenGL. It didn't have to be especially faithful (all orbits perfectly round, don't care about starting positions, etc). The most complicated part was implementing a view from a planet's surface which would rotate at the proper rate for the given planet. This was not a difficult assignment (for me, can't say anything about my classmates!).

Making it marginally more accurate for a real product would only have been a bit more effort.

[antithesizer]

Saty?

[QuercusMax]

I don't know who that is... I went to Kent State.

[soupfordummies]

Well that's ANOTHER oddball, semi-forgotten, great game!

[toast0]

Nintendo and Rare (as "Xbox Game Studios") figured out how to work together, and as of Feb 2024, you can play Blast Corps on the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack (along with a bunch of other Rare games)

[goosedragons]

It's also on Xbox via Rare Replay. And you get to keep it.