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Funniest loading screen slpash sentences

Moustachauve

By Moustachauve
in KSP1 Discussion

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  On 12/21/2016 at 6:03 PM, Sharpy said:

Could someone explain "floating origin"?

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IIRC the game uses floating point math to keep track of the positions of objects over the distances the engine is required to work with.

So it's a simple noun→verb wordplay suggesting they're floating the origin points for each object on water.

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Arsonide

Arsonide

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  On 12/21/2016 at 9:33 PM, String Witch said:

IIRC the game uses floating point math to keep track of the positions of objects over the distances the engine is required to work with.

So it's a simple noun→verb wordplay suggesting they're floating the origin points for each object on water.

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Not quite, but you're on the right track. Floating point math breaks down as you move further away from the origin due to loss of precision. Only so many decimal places can fit in a number, and as the numbers get larger, you get more places on the left, and less places on the right. In most games this causes unpredictable symptoms. My first encounter with it was modding Morrowind - cliff racers spawned very far out in the ocean would jitter like mad. That's a common symptom, but you see it sprout up in various ways. I think in Minecraft they call it the "Far Lands" or something.

Anyway, there's a method known as "floating origin" that software engineers use in many games to deal with this issue. Essentially, after the player moves a certain distance from the origin, the player is snapped back to the origin, and everything in the world is moved with him so that from his perspective, he hasn't really moved. You could say that it's as if the origin "floated" to a new location. Sometimes you can feel when this snap happens due to various artifacts occurring. In KSP you might notice some particles suddenly appear or disappear, or sounds suddenly sound like they are in a different location. But overall, from the player's perspective he's moving seamlessly through an incredibly large world with little to no loss of floating point precision.

Anyway, if it is not already evident, KSP uses this method (As is well documented from Felipe's talk at Unite in 2013) to keep precision high at all times, while maintaining the scale of a massive solar system. So this loading hint is a sort of double entendre.

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