In a simulation, is it more important to be realistic or functional? I am creating a space simulation game with a star map. I started out just randomly placing stars in a rough circular pattern along a plane. The stars would have a random xyz coordinate but would be more dispersed along the xz plane. This looked nice, but not realistic..... I am now using xyz coordinates (and names) from the HABHYG database. I'm using the first 2000 star closest to our solar system. This gives me a roughly spherical map. I don't think it "looks" as good as the random one, but I want to be as realistic as possible.......
Thoughts?
The fastest code is the code never written.