Spin-off

Working on a spin off, kind of. Based on a idea I had when first doing AE the time, plus some MMORPG I've been mucking with since then.

Trying to brainstorm some ideas (thanks Mike!)

I'm doing something new, and am at a bit of loss on how to implement. Or even design it. I want to do something that swaps Great Circle around.

I want to have any number of points, and have those points have a radius of effect. Then, given a point (A), I want to find all other points whose radius of effect encompasses A.

So you can think of it as a bunch of fires that give off a certain amount of heat (the radius of effect). So given A, I need to find all fires around A that have some kind of effect on A – and in this analogy, what I really want to do is find out the temperature at point A. Some of the fires would have no effect (too far away), yet ones VERY far away may have an effect, if they are really big fires. So a small fire 500 feet away would have no effect. A small one 1 feet away would have a big effect. A really really massive one in Seattle would have a small effect on someone in Columbia.

And I need to do this on a sphere, be able to handle “fires” anywhere on the sphere, handle a large set of fires (many millions), and need to be able to do it fast in the DB.

I’m not sure even sure if I’m thinking about it correctly – maybe it should be some kind of heat map that’s laid on top of a sphere, and the map is changed when a fire starts, so given A I can just get that areas temp from the heat map. But on the other end of it, I can’t pre-calc every possible point on the sphere that the new fire effects.