Game Design Log - Entry #3

I've been trying to sleep for the past hour, but things keep coming to mind... Figure I should write them down before I lose them.

Physics is the name of the game for the Lunar Lander game I'm making. It needs to work well, and (to my mind) it needs to be accurate. This is going to take at least a few things, that I can think of.

First up, I want/need it to have a consistent scale. I remember seeing something about DPI while poking around in C# earlier. If I can get the DPI of the screen the program is running on, I can set a scale(Say 1 inch = 10 meters), and have it generate the movement offsets based on that to always have 1 inch be 10 meters. So long as I have a consistent way to get to this, it should work without too much trouble.

Next up, ballistic trajectories and thrust. This is going to be the difficult one. With my rudimentary knowledge of physics, getting this right is going to be interesting. I'll need to set a mass for my ship, and the amount of thrust that my thrusters will provide(Possibly factoring in a "spool up" time to get up to full thrust), and do all sorts of math that I'll have to research based on those to be able to get my trajectory for which direction to move and how far in a given timeframe. So long as I set a framerate that it can keep up with, and base my math on that framerate, this should be doable. So far my experiments have been running at ~58 FPS, which means I'll need to set up my trajectory math to come out with meters per second divided by 58. Ideally I'd figure out how to set up the framerate so that it works out what that particular computer can handle dynamically, but I doubt I'll get to that.

I'll need to keep track of what angle I'm moving at(degrees) and what speed I'm moving at(m/s, probably), as well as which direction the ship is facing(degrees). If I do a spool-up time for the thruster, I'll also need to keep track of how long the thruster has been on(Probably in ticks, not seconds).

These are the major things that have been going through my head as I try to sleep tonight. Now that I've got it written down, I'm going to go try to sleep again...