Oolite Bulletins

Planet.radius is a read only property.

The witchspace tunnel effect grants time for the system to be generated prior to the player's arrival. How much of that time is likely to be spent generating the planet?

Because if it's negligible then there might be an option to achieve some interesting effects by converting planet. radius from read only to read/write.

Suppose that the planet were to slowly shrink as the player left it behind. This could create the illusion of the sun being proportionally much larger (with the glare effect helping in thus regard), wherever one were to. E within the system.

Of course, returning to the planet would require the radius to slowly be restored and the f7 depiction of the planet size might become suspiciously variable if reading from the same data. Additionally there's the potential complication of added planets and moons but... bigger suns without er, bigger suns.

whilst similar could be achieved by having one or more of the following be adjustable on the fly: sun radius; sun distance modifier; torus drive multiplier; ship speed (during torus use)...
They wouldn't necessarily create the same strength of illusion re planet being tiny compared to the star.

So what's the computational cost of re-plotting/creating a planet vs moving it vs calculating how it appears re player distance?
Could the effect of player distance on the drwing of the planet be non linear?

In Strangers World the other planets are much further away and are tiny when seen from the witchpoint (or the main planet, or the sun).

I've yet to really try Norby's Far Planets. But it'll be similar, I'm sure.

Yes but the issue is not that the sun can't be placed much away but rather that in doing so it becomes obvious how tiny it is. At the other extreme, you can have it be relatively close but then as well as seeming too close, the sun again appears (much, much) too small.

The rescaling experiment addresses this but by making muktiple changes to the source code.
If the calculation for the sizes that planets should be displayed at were at say, distance * a (where a = % distance of sun distance mod from main planet),
Then a player having travelled half way from a planet to it's 'sun' would see the planet as if it were 50 times further away. Assuming that the sun where unaffected by such a formula then there is the illusion of it being, far, far larger (along with the illusion of a greater distance having ben travelled).

That formula is just a simple example and not necessarily what I'd suggest.