SpaceSimCentral

's2odan' wrote:
Procedural clouds inside gas-giants! Procedural asteroid fields/Ring systems!... I think David has it covered <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//wink3.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=';)' />
Gas-giant clouds have been on my todo list for a while already, now they're in my issues list directly because of this <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//wink3.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=';)' />Big lumpy asteroid rings aren't realistic but they're easily doable.When you've got big lumps they tend to form bigger lumps relatively quickly and then we call them moons!Would people want them as an option though?Ring systems? As in Orbitals? Got that on a branch already! Also issue #2 on my todo list! <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_biggrin.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':D' />

'Cody' wrote:
<chortles> Have you seen this vid too?
Does anyone feel that the Elite control system is a bit lacking?Why does it only _seem_ to allow pitch+roll? When yaw+pitch would be a much quicker route to most direction changes?I'm not saying the roll should be removed but that it should be yaw+pitch+roll ... like in Pioneer <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_biggrin.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':D' />

Randomly spawned water "cargo" to scoop in Jovian rings would be nice... and maybe the odd nano-moon within the rings to mine...My vote would be to get Jovian Atmosphere's (and Stellar Coronas!) working before bothering with the rings.Procedural debris fields make sense for things like Lagrange Points. I know the engine can't technically do n-body physics but how plausible would it be to just hack in the L1 through L5 points as pseudo-singularities?Bounty Hunting in the Earth-Luna L5 HazMat Dump... <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_biggrin.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':D' />

'NeuralKernel' wrote:
My vote would be to get Jovian Atmosphere's (and Stellar Coronas!) working before bothering with the rings.
It's not a matter of determining priorities for things like that. I can't do a thing about it, not brainy enough!A mere lumpy bumpy gas giant ring with rocks and/or ice is within range of a lot more coders <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//wink3.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=';)' />

My first impression was that the exposure levels for the asteroids was set to high and the detail was blowing out to pure white and that they needed to fix that shiz.I also thought that the I-novae tech demo did rings/procedural asteroids better and that this was the benchmark for procedural. Pioneer works ok on my MacBook but its using the legacy renderer so I can't judge how pioneer is looking these days. Don't think ring systems are that detailed though ?My first impression was "well this is early days, but you can have my pledge because you're Sir Dave fricken Brabben (as far as I'm concerned) .I've wished Elite IV would happen for a very long time"

'trumpet' wrote:
cheer up Brianetta me old butterbean, the sandpit is pretty big you know.
I'm plenty cheerful enough. I'm just not terribly excited by Elite: Dangerous.
'fluffyfreak' wrote:
Ring systems? As in Orbitals?
No, as in ring systems. Saturn's rings are millions of metres by tens of metres (basically, flat as can be) but are very densely populated with lumps of ice. If that video by Braben was showing lumps of ice, then it's likely a fairly realistic portrayal of some of the rings near Saturn.

'Brianetta' wrote:
No, as in ring systems. Saturn's rings are millions of metres by tens of metres (basically, flat as can be) but are very densely populated with lumps of ice. If that video by Braben was showing lumps of ice, then it's likely a fairly realistic portrayal of some of the rings near Saturn.
I read they were composed of microscopic pieces of ice. Basically just tiny ice crystals full of dust. NASA usually describe them as "grains".So either the ships are really really really small in that video or some artist licence has been allowed <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//wink3.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=';)' />

The grains can be up to a kilometre across.

NASA says they: [background=rgb(244, 244, 255)]can be as large as several meters across[/background]Which is a long way from a kilometre, sorry that text was cut n' paste it seems to retained it's formatting!I'm not saying that it isn't possible but in Pioneers system we'd just call those moons, have a few hundred of them and generate them separately from the vast amount (billions) of other material in form of tiny dust grains. Also flying around fields of multi-kilometre sized asteroids magically suspended apart from each other like in that video still wouldn't happen.That's why I said it's down to artistic licence. We can have it if someone wants it, but then we'll get pulled up on it not being "realistic".

The individual elements of the rings are transient... I wouldn't be surprised if there were lumps a few klicks across sometimes, quickly dispersed in a hail of snowballs redirected by a moonlet's passage...A dense Planetary Ring is probably the closest natural phenomena to the Space Opera "Asteroid Thicket", but there are also things like Kessler Syndrome to consider when it comes to populated worlds.[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome[/url] combat this gradual effect I've heard a few people suggest using one of the Lagrange Points as a "landfill", which would just move the problem but at least keep it from directly affecting trans-atmospheric navigation. Basically, I think a boneyard / junkyard in space would be the most realistic place (in terms of physics and economics) to have dogfights among clutter. They would be natural Black Market and Piracy havens, refugee camps... awesome places to get into some trouble <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//wink3.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=';)' />Natural Planetary rings have a rustic charm of their own... and being able to mine water from them, then drop downstairs to top up the hydrogen would make long range exploration much easier.

'NeuralKernel' wrote:
The individual elements of the rings are transient... I wouldn't be surprised if there were lumps a few klicks across sometimes, quickly dispersed in a hail of snowballs redirected by a moonlet's passage...
Exactly! <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />Here's a link that can corroborate this.[url]http://www.space.com...lanet-ring.html[/url] few quotes from that link because people might not want to read the whole page <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />
Quote:
"Scientists have never seen objects actually form before," said Carl Murray, a Cassini imaging team member based at Queen Mary, University of London. "We now have direct evidence of that process and the rowdy dance between the moons and bits of space debris."......"Some of these objects will get ripped apart the next time Prometheus whips around," Murray said. "But some escape. Every time they survive an encounter, they can grow and become more and more stable."......The newly-found objects in the F ring also appear dense enough to possess what scientists call "self-gravity." This means that they can attract more particles and accumulate in size as ring particles bounce around in Prometheus' wake, Murray said......
However:
Quote:
"Still, these giant snowballs have short life spans, likely forming and breaking apart within a few months."
Also, while it's true that any body that moves within the "Roche Limit" of a planet will eventually crumble to dust, it doesn't happen over night <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />Therefor there are conceivably billions of very young ring systems where the process has only just begun. In those systems I would expect larger, more uneven sized rock/ice formations.Braben says he believes Ring systems are Transient. 3:15-ish in the procedural video.My point with that wall of text was just to illustrate that we can have a really cool feature like procedural rocks/ice formations inside rings and have it remain in the realms of possibility <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//wink3.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=';)' />The "Joshua Calvert" in all of us will be very happy for it <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//wink3.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=';)' />
'NeuralKernel' wrote:
To combat this gradual effect I've heard a few people suggest using one of the Lagrange Points as a "landfill"
Hehe, that reminds me of Futurama. <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//wink3.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=';)' /> The giant ball of garbage they had to deal with from the 21st century.
'FluffyFreak' wrote:
Gas-giant clouds have been on my todo list for a while already, now they're in my issues list directly because of this <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//wink3.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=';)' />
Hmm I thought I replied to you already <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />I did some work on animating fractals on the GPU just over a year ago that could have been used for animated clouds, or at least for part of it: the time I was more interested in making sunspots, something like this: There was an issue with projection that needed fixing in the shaders, but other than that it woked rather well IMO <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />IIRC Ae_ did something even more suited to clouds, but I don't recall the details.

So guys, do you reckon NASA took a terrible risk sending the Voyager probe through Saturn's rings? Thinking back now to how successful the two missions were, that would have been tragic if it had been destroyed then after travelling so far.

's2odan' wrote:
The "Joshua Calvert" in all of us will be very happy for it
Indeed... an interesting character, is 'Lagrange' Calvert.

's2odan' wrote:
Hmm I thought I replied to you already <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />I did some work on animating fractals on the GPU just over a year ago that could have been used for animated clouds, or at least for part of it: the time I was more interested in making sunspots, something like this: There was an issue with projection that needed fixing in the shaders, but other than that it woked rather well IMO <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />IIRC Ae_ did something even more suited to clouds, but I don't recall the details.
Yeah your shader_fun branch is what led to my current #1 issue we've been discussing on the mailing list <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//wink3.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=';)' /> its all your fault <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_biggrin.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':D' /> in the best possible manner of course!I can see/imagine gas giant clouds needing a more complete solution than you would get away with on rocky worlds but that's a much later issues to address after a lot of other big ones, hopefully someone else will tackle it before i have to <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_biggrin.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':D' />Andy

Hi all,My name is Ashley and I work as the community support manager at Frontier. I'm just signing up to make myself available to answer any questions about Elite: Dangerous you may have, and hopefully help with any concerns as well.Obviously there are things that I won't be able to help you with, but I'll try to be as candid as possible with my replies and provide you with the best answers I can!Thanks, Ashley

Welcome aboard Commander Ashley.

'Straker' wrote:
Welcome aboard Commander Ashley.
Thank you very much! Hopefully I can be of some use to you all.

Hi Ashley, great to see you here! <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//girl_smile.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':girlsmile:' />

'FrontierAshley' wrote:
to answer any questions about Elite: Dangerous
Questions? Heh... I could ask oodles of them, but I'll refrain. Welcome aboard, Ashley!You should maybe drop a line into the other E: D thread too... not everyone reads all the sub-forums here.

'FrontierAshley' wrote:
'm just signing up to make myself available to answer any questions about Elite: Dangerous you may have, and hopefully help with any concerns as well.
Not a question as such, more of a statement, but i think where Braben is aiming at the moment is probably in line with what i'm thinking. Look at Elite, look at Frontier, look at Oolite, look at Pioneer, look at RSI, etc.... then take a step back and say, ok, what are those guys not doing that would be awesome.