The more I dig into the galaxy system and the more I explore what UE5 can do for us, the closer we’re getting to a true 1:1 scale galaxy. In fact, today I tentatively binned the idea of splitting each star system into cubes and went with true 1:1 scale movement within a system. The physics seems to be handling it pretty decently so far, and that means each star system now has a scale of 946,073,047,258,080,000cm^3. That’s a whole cubic lightyear in cm, which of course by extension means we’ve actually now got the entire galaxy modelled at a resolution of 1cm. It melts my brain just thinking about it.
To traverse the galaxy at that scale the ship is going to have to move at around 2,000,000 C.
The galaxy itself is still split into 100ly^3 sectors, but in order to push the realism even further the number of stars generated in each sector is now being driven by a density map like this;
In fact that’s the actual density map, with each pixel representing a single 100ly sector. The stellar density currently goes from 0 to 8000 stars per-sector, driven by the 0-1 value of each pixel. The galaxy is also 10 sectors deep, so each layer will have its own density map to form the full 3D shape.
So not only is the galaxy now modelled at a cm scale, it’s also the correct shape too! 