World space and local space

Hellion uses two types of coordinate spaces world space and local space. Coordinate spaces are a fundamental part of Unity programming, but in Hellion spaces are treated a bit differently.

When you are on a ship. the ship object is always located at XYZ 0, 0, 0 on the game client, not at the actual position of the ship in world space.

A technical explaination of this is how Unity uses 32-bit floats for world position, where the largest number is 2,147,483,647.

Therefore, in a world as large as Hellion, it is common to use 64-bit floats, which has a limit at an insanely large number that cannot be written here.

Instead of switiching to an engine that supports 64-bit floats, it is much easier to just transform every object into the vecinity of the player into a per-player local space. Therefore Hellion uses two spaces internally: local space for space objects near the player and world space for orbital calculations and objects stored on the server.