Oolite Bulletins

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.

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.

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

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)!

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..

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.

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...

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...