Year Length Slider

[Yaakov719]

The ability to tune day length and axial tilt are super useful for simulating accurate temperature maps by "month". However, would it be possible for you to add a "year length" slider to more accurately simulate the temperature of planets with longer / shorter years? Also, if you had the ability to set the day length equal to the year length in order to simulate regional temperatures of tidally locked worlds, that would be amazing.

[davidson16807]

Orbital parameters are already represented in the model. We would just need to expose them in the user interface. The reason this hasn't been done is that the model isn't suitable to handle non-earthlike planets, i.e. planets where substances like water, nitrogen, or silica operate at different phases and have different material properties. That's what all the work on the C++ port has been about. If not for that feature, the C++ port would have likely have already been released by now, and woud serve as the backbone of tectonics.js, but I don't feel it would have offered much benefit over the present model, and it would have been much more difficult to implement than starting from a clean slate.

However we might be able to get away with exposing some orbital parameters in the UI, as long as there are limits to the settings that don't make the simulation outright bogus. This would be a great first issue if someone is interested.