Collision Fragments Are WAY Too Large Now?

[Eapple]

Last year in August, I was playing around with the community playtest beta version. I really liked the impressive, cinematic-look to the fragmentation, even though it was much much laggier. Here's a shot of it: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2565889200
I recently started playing again and I noticed that the fragments have become huge with every collision, almost looking oversized or cartoonish. Here's an example image, with the same scene: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2848197983
While I still love the new collision fragmentation, it doesn't feel as raw and powerful when all of the fragments from huge collisions are similarly-sized and often hundreds of kilometers wide. The images should speak for themselves. Numerous smaller fragments give it a very different feeling.

I hope there could be a compromise between giving us beautiful collisions and maintaining reasonable performance. The improvements over the years have been stunning, so I trust there will be more coming :D

[bshapiroalbert]

Thank you for your feedback and your question!

We are constantly working on improving how collisions work in Universe Sandbox and have made many changes in the last year to make them more realistic.

The main change in the size of collision fragment size that we've made was to make the results of collisions independent of the simulation speed.

Previously, the number of fragments was related to the simulation speeds, so a slower speed would give you more small fragments, and faster speeds would result in fewer larger fragments.

However, we didn't want the result of a collision to be different depending on your simulation speed. Now the size of fragments is based on the total computed volume of material that needs to be ejected at the beginning of the collision and the total number of fragments allowed in the simulation (among other things).

If you increase the number of non-attracting objects under
Home > Settings > Performance

You should see more, smaller fragments. However, please note that increasing this number may lead to reduced performance.

[Eapple]

Thanks for the response! I'm glad to see an explanation for why the change happened. I see there's already a good compromise solution, so I'll try that out.