rthorvald wrote:chris wrote:all the minor moons of Jupiter and Saturn clutter both the 3D view (when orbits are enabled) and the GUI, and it's only on rare occasions that you actually want to see them. My current plan is to add a new "minormoon" category and organize the UI so that they appear in a separate category from the more significant moons.
Why not use a slider (like the one for stars) that changes the prominence of the orbit lines?
For example, the smaller the moon, the more transparent is its orbit lines. Hook this up to a slider that defines how much transparency is allowed in general, and let everything else be a percentage of that...
If you also added a checkbox to invert it (so that the smaller the moon, the more prominent its orbit), then the user will have pretty good control over what he wants to see.
My concern is that the difference between a 'major' and 'minor' moon is rather subjective. Phobos and Deimos are primary examples: they're tiny, and automatic schemes would tend to not prominently show their orbits. We could set the opacity based on the relative size of the moon and the planet, but I fear this would still result in inappropriately faint orbits in some cases. For example, Mimas is much smaller than Titan--I fear it would be a very delicate balancing act to get reasonable default rendering of orbits, and the user would end up having to tweak the slider at each planet.
--Chris
(<- not sure what I'm saying here!)
