Celestia Forums

do you plan to implement the ast?roids circle between Mars and Jupiter ?
it should be amazing !
Franco

I guess that thousands objects to be computed at a time cuold be an harder task for CPU than for Chris.
In any case a wider choise of texture and 3DS models for unknown minor bodiey surfaces would breack the monotony to see the same aspect for different bodies.
This is particularly evident for bodies near each other like Satun's moons.

If you have them on a circular orbit and just randomly scatter them around, then that would already be nice looking (I think). Of course they don't have to be seen from too far and sowise they wouldn't slow us too much down.

I noticed that if you set a moon/planets values at 0, then if you goto it it takes you to the centre of the star. So, maybe if you then give the body some rings with the correct radius, and a new texture, it may look like an asteroid belt. However, it probably wont work

I noticed that if you set a moon/planets values at 0, then if you goto it it takes you to the centre of the star. So, maybe if you then give the body some rings with the correct radius, and a new texture, it may look like an asteroid belt. However, it probably wont work

Hello everybody...

I think I have a remark here: the asteroid belt doesn't look like that "asteroid field" in The Empire Strikes Back... although there are plenty of scattered bodies all around, they cover an enormous volume of space and are rather far from one another. All the asteroids together would weight less than the Earth's Moon, and there are less than 30 bodies with a diameter of 200 km or more.

The normal asteroid is less than 1 km in diameter, and very dark. Not very interesting, nor spectacular, taking in consideration that the nearest one at any moment can be thousands of kilometers apart...

However, it might be fun to model a protoplanetary disk the way of a very dense asteroid field. That would be fun to fly through...

Best regards.

Bruckner

As Bruckner mentioned, asteroid belts are nearly as crowded as they're always portrayed in movies. There are a few main belt asteroids in Celestia already--Ceres, Pallas, Vesta, and Juno are in solarsys.ssc. These are four of the largest asteroids in the solar system, and so are not representative of what your average asteroid looks like.

Celestia wouldn't handle the rendering of a very dense asteroid field well anyhow. It's designed for scenes where there are just a few (the practical limit is probably around twenty) objects larger than a single pixel to render. I will fix this at some point, but it hasn't been an issue so far for rendering realistic scenes of space.

--Chris