User:SignpostMarv Martin/Sandbox/Project:Celestial Effects
- This is article is a draft intending to be housed under Project:Celestial Effects. Links in this article are likely to not exist, please do not create the articles.
Abstract of data to make accessible
- Individual celestial bodies
- Attributes of celestial bodies
- Clusters of celestial bodies
Examples
- The Sun
- Position in space (relative from the core of the milky way
- Constellations
Considering the amount of data attributable to an individual star, never mind an entire galaxy or the universe, flat-file/xml files are likely out of the question. A database such as SQLite would probably be more efficient. Tools which use this database would then be able to only query the information they'd need, rather than everything.
One Celestial Effects package might not care for the elemental composition of individual stars, and render everything as white points of light, needing only to query the positions.
Another Celestial Effects package might draw lines between points of a constellation, so would need to access the stars in a constellation, or supply it's own data based from the ID of each star in the constellation and calculate it's own paths.
The position of planets would be interesting to add, as this would allow a Celestial Effects package to specify that a region or parcel was at a particular point in space, bringing to mind such effects as having a region set on the Moon instead of the planet, and have the SL Map rendered as a celestial body.