[Release] System Features: Rings

[gsagostinho]

Yes, that's the same reason why there is no collision detection with the rings: if there were you would crash into empty space where this plane is regardless if the shader is printing the rings on that part of the plane or not.

[Switeck]

Planet rings can be considered so thin that ships' shields even when low in energy laugh at them.

You could even put a small number of boulders or asteroid shards in them to represent bigger chunks of the rings.
(Can't do too many because of Oolite max unit limits.)
And also do an asteroid at the edge to represent a shepherd moon or source for ring material.

[gsagostinho]

Planet rings can be considered so thin that ships' shields even when low in energy laugh at them.

I like that! The particles are very small and the layer is so thin that ships can safely and routinely go through them.

You could even put a small number of boulders or asteroid shards in them to represent bigger chunks of the rings.
(Can't do too many because of Oolite max unit limits.)
And also do an asteroid at the edge to represent a shepherd moon or source for ring material.

I thought about doing that but the difficulty is that as I mentioned before the rings are created via a shader and are not a 3D object. So as far as the game is concerned, the rings are actually a square plan intersecting the planet (a transparent canvas upon which the shader draws the rings). The problem is that there is no way of knowing where the rings are outside the shader, and so I can't add anything to be on the rings since this object might be already further away or much inside. I think I will just leave it as it is now.

[Switeck]

The boulders or asteroid shards would look just fine either embedded in the rings or just outside them as micro shepherd moons.

[another_commander]

Following commit 7b73e99, things like these have just become possible:

[Svengali]

Following commit 7b73e99, things like these have just become possible:

Yeeehaa! R'n'R a_c!!!

[gsagostinho]

Wow, that looks fantastic, another_commander! As soon as the nightly is out I will make a new version of this OXP. In your screenshots, did you just add a fixed amount of alpha or did you make the alpha proportional to the intensity of the colours? I will try both and see what I can come up with.

I am also considering to fade the rings in and out when at very far distances, given that they simply disappear at around 2.7 OU from the planet. I think that might look better than now, when they just pop into/out of existence.

Cheers!

[another_commander]

In your screenshots, did you just add a fixed amount of alpha or did you make the alpha proportional to the intensity of the colours?

Some tests were made with a fixed alpha of 0.3, others with your OXP code unaltered. Screens were taken at various moments during the test and I think the bottom pic is with the fixed 0.3 alpha. In any case, your OXP should work right out of the box with the new build.

[gsagostinho]

That's fantastic, I just checked the code and indeed I left the alpha code in place in case such feature would ever be implemented, thank you so much. I will check if everything is looking fine and see what can be improved, perhaps besides the fade in/out I mentioned I could also cap the max alpha to any ring band to a value lower than 1.0 even when the colours are at peak intensity, let's see.

[gsagostinho]

Wow, this is how this OXP is looking now out of the box. Wonderful stuff, another_commander. I am actually very satisfied with how it is looking!

[Griff]

wow, just saw this posted in the screenshots, smashing work guys, these look really amazing, nearly every week i pop into the screenshots thread and there some new fantastic thing just invented

[Prester John]

You just need a lot more memory on your PC, for all these graphics... Right?

[gsagostinho]

@Griff Thank you so much! I actually coded the alpha channel logic in the shader so, to my surprise, this did not require any update whatsoever That said, I am thinking about raising a tiny bit the minimum amount of transparency, I will experiment here and perhaps make a new version

@Prester John That depends on what you consider as lots of memory. I do have a powerful laptop and Oolite runs without frame rate issues, but I think you can get away with a much weaker PC. I think that this OXP is not very heavy on low-end systems, for instance. The easier thing is to give it a try and see it for yourself

[gsagostinho]

What do you guys think about this? I have tweaked the formula which calculates the alpha channel component to make the rings look less transparent than in my last images. I think these look more realistic, any opinions on this?

[phkb]

What do I think? I have no idea. My mind has been blown.