03-03-2015, 10:07 AM
Our art team has been making some really cool buildings lately... including some bigger ones. Some of them are big enough that we have to face this fact: "up" isn't a constant direction in a space colony.
Of course it's not a constant direction on Earth, either; "up" means away from the center of the Earth, so if you made a building many thousands of kilometers long, it would have substantial curvature to it. But because the Earth is so big, on normal human scale, we can ignore this, and build as if the world were flat. Walls meet floors at 90° angles, and stay parallel to each other as they go up.
A space colony, however, is substantially smaller than Earth. If you have a big enough building in a small enough colony, then the fact that "up" always points towards the spin axis actually impacts the geometry of the building. Walls no longer meet floors at a right angle, and they bend in a little as they go up. The overall shape of the building has to curve a little, matching the curvature of the station around the Y axis, so that no matter where you stand in it, the walls seem vertical to you.
So we've implemented just such an adjustment (ticket #122) for version 0.14.
![[Image: VZxCT.jpg]](http://i.snag.gy/VZxCT.jpg)
It's a pretty subtle effect, as it should be unless your colony is really tiny. The above image is in a cylinder with a 300-m radius, almost as small as a reasonable cylinder can get. If you look carefully at the strip mall, you may notice that it's slightly curved, matching the local gravity at each point. This includes the water feature out front, which is a good thing, otherwise the water would slop right out!
Of course it's not a constant direction on Earth, either; "up" means away from the center of the Earth, so if you made a building many thousands of kilometers long, it would have substantial curvature to it. But because the Earth is so big, on normal human scale, we can ignore this, and build as if the world were flat. Walls meet floors at 90° angles, and stay parallel to each other as they go up.
A space colony, however, is substantially smaller than Earth. If you have a big enough building in a small enough colony, then the fact that "up" always points towards the spin axis actually impacts the geometry of the building. Walls no longer meet floors at a right angle, and they bend in a little as they go up. The overall shape of the building has to curve a little, matching the curvature of the station around the Y axis, so that no matter where you stand in it, the walls seem vertical to you.
So we've implemented just such an adjustment (ticket #122) for version 0.14.
It's a pretty subtle effect, as it should be unless your colony is really tiny. The above image is in a cylinder with a 300-m radius, almost as small as a reasonable cylinder can get. If you look carefully at the strip mall, you may notice that it's slightly curved, matching the local gravity at each point. This includes the water feature out front, which is a good thing, otherwise the water would slop right out!
Joe Strout
Lead Developer, High Frontier
