Oolite Bulletins

Just a couple of ideas that have been floating around the back of my mind lately.. Especially since I recently began using a graphics card that can cope with Povray Planets and a bunch of graphically-intensive OXPs

The first one that occurs to me would be solar flares.. If a way was found to add those to stars, it would be just mind-blowing!

The other idea is.. With all the work that has been done lately on realistic planets, has anyone considered trying to simulate Auroras?

They would look just amazing, IMO.. Especially since we now know that several planets in our own solar system have them..

Views from the ISS:







Jupiter:



Saturn:




And as for the videos that are available.. just wow..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogtKe7N05F0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=7AmyfuJDMlY

I think the possibility exists (if I ever manage to integrate the shady-planets branch with trunk), providing you enjoy writing shaders.

I have experimented with ray marching through the atmosphere volume and gotten close to something which could be used for rendering volume like effects. For aurora I think the atmosphere GL blend mode would need to be tweakable from planetinfo.plist so that you could specify additive blending.

Volunteers are probably needed

Cool.. hopefully one of our talented team of artists will take it on.

See also the stunning images in this thread posted by Smivs a while back..

Aurora: probably yes.

Solar flares: likely no. The suns are still not rendered as spheroid objects, but are just disks. Although I do seem to remember an experimental screenshot with sunspots, so there may be more possibilities in 1.77 …

Commander McLane wrote:

Solar flares: likely no. The suns are still not rendered as spheroid objects, but are just disks.

Not with that method. However imposters can have shaders too I think, they're just polygons with textures. Some interesting 2D shaders examples here http://glsl.heroku.com/

Solar flares would be awesome.

Could they be made to damage your ship or systems if you got caught in one?
If they were relatively slow moving maybe make them lethal (but somewhat predictable)?

Some added risk to skimming?

Solar flares...

For those systems with "Unpredictable solar activity"

Ideas of effect coming very soon in my forthcoming fiction.

<rubs hands in anticipation>


!m!

Commander McLane wrote:

I do seem to remember an experimental screenshot with sunspots

The experimental sunspots are quite effective:

Of course, "unpredictable solar activity" could have all sorts of effects - maybe, during a sunstorm, a ship's scanner becomes unreliable. Would there be a way to introduce glitches to the scanner? Even just the occasional random sudden appearance and disappearance of dozens of ghost blips ...

The player would need to be warned, of course, or it would just look like a bug: "Attention, all pilots! We are currently experiencing a force six sunstorm: this will negatively affect ships' scanning equipment for the duration of the storm. Take extra precautions during close manoeuvres. That is all."

If NPCs were also affected, that would make for an interesting spaceflight environment.

Rese249er wrote:

If NPCs were also affected, that would make for an interesting spaceflight environment.

It could also allow another piece of equipment upgrade: a sunstorm scanner filter, which might reduce the ill effects of bad solar weather ...

Also, thick asteroid fields combined with sunstorm-futzed scanners would lead to some hairy eyeball-to-eyeball fights...

Rese249er wrote:

Also, thick asteroid fields combined with sunstorm-futzed scanners would lead to some hairy eyeball-to-eyeball fights...

That's why I sometimes dogfight with the hud turned-off! Nothing but eye-candy - ships, laser beams, missiles - and sound effects!

That makes a good bit of sense, but asteroids would also provide an environmental hazard. And perhaps some functional integration with AutoLock and Military Targetting to make them virtually useless by way of autolocking or targetting completely useless targets, considering they work off scanners.