(Demo) Black Holes
Posted: Tue Nov 14, 2023 6:12 am
It turns out, we can create a black hole in Oolite, even after the fix mentioned in this thread Issue with planet texture for extra planets.
Yes, that big black section in the middle of the screen is a black hole.
To create this, set the planet texture to be a PNG file with nothing in it (that is, not all white, or all black, but delete everything). Set the planet texture to that. Then set the illumination color to [0, 0, 0] and you get something like the above screenshot. You'd probably need to set a few other things in planetinfo.plist (cloud settings, I'm thinking, making sure there aren't any, atmosphere settings, etc). But from a visual point of view, it's a black hole. Not a black sphere that has reflections. But, for all intents and purposes, a black hole.
*Big caveat*. This only works at a graphical level of "Shaders Enabled" or "Extra Detail". Anything below that and you see something like this:
Edit to add: you can see some of the reflection on the moons surface in the lower half of the shot.
Here's a demo OXP I put together for this. BlackHoleDemo.oxz. This will add a "Black Hole" a *really* long way out in every system. Please note: there is no gameplay in this demo (ie gravitational changes, proximity dangers, time skewing etc). It's just a tech demo. If someone wants to play around a bit more, they are welcome to grab with demo and run with it.
Anyway, I thought it might be worth sharing to get those creative juices flowing!
Note: You might want Galactic Almanac installed, as it will put a beacon on the black hole to make navigating to it reasonably easily.
Yes, that big black section in the middle of the screen is a black hole.
To create this, set the planet texture to be a PNG file with nothing in it (that is, not all white, or all black, but delete everything). Set the planet texture to that. Then set the illumination color to [0, 0, 0] and you get something like the above screenshot. You'd probably need to set a few other things in planetinfo.plist (cloud settings, I'm thinking, making sure there aren't any, atmosphere settings, etc). But from a visual point of view, it's a black hole. Not a black sphere that has reflections. But, for all intents and purposes, a black hole.
*Big caveat*. This only works at a graphical level of "Shaders Enabled" or "Extra Detail". Anything below that and you see something like this:
Edit to add: you can see some of the reflection on the moons surface in the lower half of the shot.
Here's a demo OXP I put together for this. BlackHoleDemo.oxz. This will add a "Black Hole" a *really* long way out in every system. Please note: there is no gameplay in this demo (ie gravitational changes, proximity dangers, time skewing etc). It's just a tech demo. If someone wants to play around a bit more, they are welcome to grab with demo and run with it.
Anyway, I thought it might be worth sharing to get those creative juices flowing!
Note: You might want Galactic Almanac installed, as it will put a beacon on the black hole to make navigating to it reasonably easily.