Hello there. First of all, thanks for playing our game.

Is the tech you’re working on in orbit_tesselation intended for another game idea? I’d be interested to know where you’re going with this, or other projects using the same tech.

Originally, I created orbit_tessellation just for fun, after reading how KSP 2 renders orbits. It did become useful to us later though, as we used it in our final project in CS class. The project was basically a planner for interplanetary maneuvers (porkchop plots and previewing the respective orbits in 3D). The project isn’t currently open-source, but we could make it if you’re interested (be aware though, that the code is really messy in some places).

Any plans on packaging it up in a way that doesn’t depend on a specific third party bevy crate? I’ve got a backburner project that could potentially benefit from an easy-to-use orbital mechanics plugin.

There aren’t any plans for releasing the crate on crates.io, neither with nor without bevy_polyline. However, it should be pretty straight-forward to do remove bevy_polyline (or put it behind a feature flag) if you really wanted to use it. The tessellation/rendering is separate from the orbit calculations themselves. I wouldn’t really recommend using it, though. The code only supports elliptic orbits at the moment, and there’s some weird stuff going on with converting between physics and bevy coordinate systems (currently there’s just a quick and dirty fix, without actually understanding what’s going wrong).

If you have any other questions, feel free to contact me on Discord (netzwerk2) or via Matrix (@netzwerk2:matrix.org).