The Drawing Tab

This page gives you control over how the planets are drawn.  It is broken into “General” options and “Trail Controls”.

General

Trail Controls

You may select the trails to appear as lines, dots, or not at all.  You may also fade the trails.  One of the coolest effects is drawing the trail definition points to simulate motion.  If this is selected, a dotted trail will appear to follow the planet and will give a sense of motion to the trail.  For this to work however, make sure the trail accuracy slider is not maximized (all the way to the right).  If every trail point is drawn, motion can not be simulated.

Move the Trail Length slider to the right to show more of the trail history.  But note that long trail lengths can make performance suffer.  If trails are faded, the fading effect is spread out over the trail length you set here.

Trail Size can be increased by moving this slider to the right.

Trail accuracy is here for two reasons.  First, by lowering the trail accuracy, you can sometimes improve the performance of the system since fewer points are being drawn.  So it is here as a user controllable optimization.  Second, as trail accuracy decreases and less trail points are drawn, you can get some unique visual effects depending on the other current trail settings.