Oolite Bulletins

Odd - I don't get that at all.

Is it intended that a limited number of planets will have planetary rings in the next version of Oolite?

I noticed the magic number 10000.0 here in the fragment shader - because it was a magic constant I found worked in shady planets for some things, it also failed to work on the F7 view.

cim - is this an artifact of some GL scaling ? I cannot find it.

It's a scaling factor - basically to get the bands in the ring (r2 being the squared distance from the centre of the ring, in units of the size of the ring object - which is itself much bigger than the ring)

Since it's a squared distance, it comes to 100 bands across the entire radius of the ring object, which experimentally gave the right look for the visible part of the ring.

Now 1.77 is out this is an officially released OXP, with a few extra tweaks to make the rings look better.

I do not seem to be able to get this oxp to work at all, I wonder, might it be in conflict with my currently installed oxp's (I'm thinking system redux,sensible suns BGS). I don't know

I have added the oxp to my add ons, but so far not even a feathering of astro dust surrounding a planet..I'm not unduly concerned, but I think this oxp would be a wonderful visual add on.
I'm running 64 bit windows 8 on i5 processor with intel(R) graphics, with 8 gig of RAM, not that I know what any of that means, but hey..it might be or might not be relevant

Duggan wrote:

I do not seem to be able to get this oxp to work at all, I wonder, might it be in conflict with my currently installed oxp's (I'm thinking system redux,sensible suns BGS). I don't know

I have added the oxp to my add ons, but so far not even a feathering of astro dust surrounding a planet..I'm not unduly concerned, but I think this oxp would be a wonderful visual add on.
I'm running 64 bit windows 8 on i5 processor with intel(R) graphics, with 8 gig of RAM, not that I know what any of that means, but hey..it might be or might not be relevant

You have to be patient - they are a rare thing indeed. It probably took 4 or 5 days after installing before I saw my first ring system .

Duggan wrote:

I do not seem to be able to get this oxp to work at all,....

Like said above, be patience. The proof-of-concept version added one around every planet, but the download page of this oxp writes: "Adds rings to 1-4 systems in each galaxy."

That means that finding rings will be a rare event. Just a rare as level 14 systems. Peeking into the code, I see that only the biggest planets have rings, so you could select on the galactic map one of the biggest planets and travel to that system. You should see the rings there.

Nice, gonna grab this one!

Yes.that was it... all I needed to do was look me up the big Planets.. Thanks for the help

I am currently in Galaxy 8 and had to travel a long way in order to visit the only planet in the whole galaxy that sports a ring.

Sunspots is now also an officially released OXP, fixing the various reported bugs (and also the unreported but really annoying bug that the sunspots rarely matched the sun's colour) in the demonstration version.

Download link in first post and  on the wiki

It would be really cool to add "shepherd" moons to the rings.
Basically random asteroid types at the various ring gaps, or at least 1 asteroid just outside the radius of all the rings.

This would help explain how the rings got there and stay there.

Are the rings always at a set distance from the planet?

Switeck wrote:

It would be really cool to add "shepherd" moons to the rings.
Basically random asteroid types at the various ring gaps, or at least 1 asteroid just outside the radius of all the rings.

This would help explain how the rings got there and stay there.

Are the rings always at a set distance from the planet?

I tried adding asteroids into the rings, and they don't really look right - it just emphasises the scale gap (rings on planetary scale, asteroids on ship scale). I even tried making the ring system out of asteroids and not bothering with the ring as such (okay, but 800 asteroids stretches the frame rate a bit, and still looks wrong for scale)

Adding a small moon as a planet might work, though I suspect again the scales might look very odd.

If an asteroid embedded in the rings looks wrong, one just outside the rings might not.
Or if they seems too large, how about boulders?