Rings around planets?

drew · Post by **drew** » Thu Aug 10, 2006 9:08 am

On thing I really liked about FE2 was the rings around planets. These are really only suitable for gas giants, which don't (as yet) exist in Oolite, but could there be a mechanism for adding rings to planets?

Just eye candy, I suppose, unless the rings could be dotted with interesting bits of debris...

Cheers,

Drew.

Post by **dajt** » Thu Aug 10, 2006 11:54 am

I started tinkering with that a couple of days ago, but I don't have a lot of time right now so not much is happening.

I think any planet could have a ring system if a small moon or something was broken up in orbit.

One problem is that the rings will look pretty stupid when you fly close to/through them. I'm using gluDisk to create them so they're razor thin. I had two disks with two cylinders to make them thicker but it didn't look any better.

I also need to figure out how to create good textures for the rings. I haven't even started on that due to the above mentioned time problem.

Draco_Caeles · Post by **Draco_Caeles** » Thu Aug 10, 2006 1:48 pm

I just ran FFE out of curiosity and had a quick jump out to Saturn in my Thargoid fighter

The rings are generated as concentric circles of unit thickness, for obvious reasons. I wouldn't worry about it too much, David

LittleBear · Post by **LittleBear** » Thu Aug 10, 2006 4:43 pm

I've made some Gas Giants for my Assassins.oxp, but they're are Jupiter types without rings. The task of adding hundereds of asteroids to make a ring was too much (and would have slowed the game down horribley)!

Murgh · Post by **Murgh** » Thu Aug 10, 2006 4:46 pm

last Giles wrote about this was in Oct.05 when addMoon and addPlanet came about:

aegidian wrote:
Actually that might not be too difficult. I'll put it into the back-mind and see if it emerges again.
Remind me after I finish with v1.58.

and then when reminded late Nov.05

aegidian wrote:
The rings will require a texture to be stretched round them. I'm still thinking about this...

but since, the considerable progress has been on other fronts..

CWolf · Post by **CWolf** » Thu Aug 10, 2006 4:57 pm

Alternative way of doing it...

LOADS of asteroids circling it and a thin ring veil around them. Then it looks right from a distance and realistic at close up.

Rxke · Post by **Rxke** » Thu Aug 10, 2006 6:35 pm

CWolf wrote:
Alternative way of doing it...

LOADS of asteroids

It'd probably bring Oolite to a crawl, that way; too many objects, collision detection going in overdrive...

It would look kewl, though...

lucabu · Post by **lucabu** » Fri Aug 11, 2006 6:51 am

Rxke wrote:
It'd probably bring Oolite to a crawl, that way; too many objects, collision detection going in overdrive...

It would look kewl, though...

I think the only way to do this, is to create this type of asteroids 'on the fly' as soon as the ship approaches the rings. From a bigger dinstance rings can be txturized... Transition between texturized and 'real' presentation must be investigated, of course.
Using a dynamic generation it's possible to avoid object count rising and collision detection pain.
As far as I know, at the moment this is not possibile in Oolite...