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Work would sure be less annoying if I could persuade myself not to try to write specifications for features under development as if they were Wikipedia topics. I don't even have an account on Wikipedia.
If I use a logarithmic scale, the planetary diameters turn out to be too large if I show them at the same scale as for distance. Alas, the solar system doesn't really lend itself to a linear or an exponential view. Looking at it that way, I guess I really ought to use a quadratic scale, since that's the way gravity and light fall off with distance, and that's how distance looks under constant acceleration.
And, in fact, if I do that, everything pretty much fits in. If I make pixels equal to 0.1 times the square root of the distance or size in kilometres, the Sun is 4 millimetres across at one corner, Earth is 0.4 mm across and 5 cm away, Jupiter is 1.6 mm and 12 cm away, and Neptune fits in at the other corner, 0.9 mm. Mercury fits with no trouble at 0.3 mm across and 3 cm away.
I was expecting this scheme to blow up as soon as I tried to apply it to interstellar distances, but Alpha Centauri at 4.5 light years is only 27.6 metres away. I was worried that using the square root would make the relative distances depend on the basic units, but a few moments' thought persuaded me that it doesn't. Nifty.
So yeah, I'm still trying to puzzle out how to make a space war game work as a game instead of just a painful simulation.
Meanwhile, at home, I've been in the habit of playing 1 or 2, as opposed to an endless series of, games of Space Cadet, the 3-D pinball thing that comes with Windows. Then I'd follow it up with a few attempts to complete a game of Solitaire, and then maybe Freecell. Previously I'd start the evening off with several games of Net, where I'd gotten interested in seeing not how fast I could solve a given game, but how many alternate solutions there were.
Since the start of 2008 I'd mostly let Net fall by the wayside, and this evening I am somewhat startled to realize I can get by without any games of Space Cadet or Solitaire either. This clears my slate for more rewarding things like, say, watching Youtube videos. Erm.
Oh well, one step at a time.
