Where's the ring asteroids?

Guest · Post #1by **Guest** » 23.02.2003, 22:19

I'm not new to Celestia, but there has not been any closeups of Saturn's rings looking like asteroids at all.
See here in Celestia 1.3.0pre2 :arrow:

Get close to Saturn's rings.

See? No asteroids on my computer!
This would be a great addition to Celestia!

And it should be a feature you can turn off.

If you need information about my computer, post a request.

Darkmiss · Post #2by **Darkmiss** » 23.02.2003, 22:48

I have not heard anything about Saturn rings being made too look like asteroids, or into asteroids.
where did you read this :?:

Post #3by **t00fri** » 23.02.2003, 22:54

Darkmiss wrote:I have not heard anything about Saturn rings being made too look like asteroids, or into asteroids.
where did you read this :?:

So what do you think this nice "dish" around Saturn is made of? Not asteroids, sure but pieces of rock ...It's all a matter of resolution. Slightly too much for Celestia;-)

Bye Fridger

julesstoop · Post #4by **julesstoop** » 24.02.2003, 00:01

t00fri wrote:
Darkmiss wrote:I have not heard anything about Saturn rings being made too look like asteroids, or into asteroids.
where did you read this :?:

So what do you think this nice "dish" around Saturn is made of? Not asteroids, sure but pieces of rock ...It's all a matter of resolution. Slightly too much for Celestia;-)

So what do you think asteroids are? Pieces of rock.

By the way, I'm pretty sure there's more ice in the Saturn ring particles comparing thim with standard asteroid belt asteroids.

However, it's indeed a matter of resolution. Can you imagine the amount of textures that need to be rendered if we would want to resolve the rings into seperate particles, and the amout of slightly different orbits of those particles.

Guest · Post #5by **Guest** » 24.02.2003, 01:20

What I meant was I only want the rings to be rendered as asteroids when you get close to them. :wink:

Rassilon · Post #6by **Rassilon** » 24.02.2003, 01:54

I suppose in some future ver of celestia like 3.0 or something we will see LOD support for such features inc the one I want the most...Planetary surfaces...

Darkmiss · Post #7by **Darkmiss** » 25.02.2003, 03:15

t00fri wrote:So what do you think this nice "dish" around Saturn is made of? Not asteroids, sure but pieces of rock ...It's all a matter of resolution. Slightly too much for Celestia;-)

LOL
Yeah I undestand that the rings are really tons of tiny rocks
But i meant in Celestia

At the moment its represented by a single grey transparent texture.

I woudl be very nice if we could zoom in a watch all this space dust

ThierryNotLoggedIn(again) · Post #8by **ThierryNotLoggedIn(again)** » 25.02.2003, 20:56

Rassilon wrote:such features inc the one I want the most...Planetary surfaces...

Yes, that would be great... i was wondering: would it be possible to have at least a close-up of some part of the earth (for instance, salt lake city

) so we can zoom out from there and get the big picture... Hey, chris, i am talking to you

Redfish · Post #9by **Redfish** » 25.02.2003, 21:51

There are some thing i don't think are difficult to make. Something like the rings of saturn could be a simple procedure that starts rendering simple spheres of noised spheres with a certain mean size with some variation. But only when you get closer than like 100.000 km.

The clouds for the earth are the same thing, there are opengl freesourcecode programs that allow you to render clouds.

Nebulae are another(to make them volumetric).
The galaxy is again another one (it could be so mucht more beautifully represented compared to the haze we have now).

Someone should make a procedure that renders these objects by using a certain random formula.

Thereby filling the entire galaxy with stars(who's going to check it?)
creating spheres for the rings of planets(look at the intro movie for star trek voyager the ring around that planet is made of spheres, yes it is!)
no one is going to say: hey that rock is bigger than in reality.

Clouds same story, no one will check it, the realisme is something that can be added later, when and if these real world data become available.

But untill then, i'd say fill it with fictious data.

Post #10by **t00fri** » 25.02.2003, 22:09

julesstoop wrote:
t00fri wrote:So what do you think this nice "dish" around Saturn is made of? Not asteroids, sure but pieces of rock ...It's all a matter of resolution. Slightly too much for Celestia;-)

So what do you think asteroids are? Pieces of rock.

Mind the "logics trap": asteroids certainly are pieces of rock, but not all pieces of rock are asteroids;-). Notably not the constituents of the rings of Saturn...

Perhaps you have heard of the "slight difference" between "necessary and sufficient"...

Bye Fridger

PS: Or what is the negation of
"All dogs bark"? No dog barks?

julesstoop · Post #11by **julesstoop** » 25.02.2003, 22:26

I was only trying to point out that the only real differentation between any given object being an asteroid rather than a Saturn ring piece lies in the fact that the former orbit the Sun and the latter orbit Saturn. Of course there are probably large differences in average composition and genesis, but that's not part of the definition. You generally just would see 'pieces of rock' (and ice).

So: from a Celestia renedering point of view, you'd still want to render a lot of irregularly shaped pieces of solid material. In the ring-fragment case just with a denser distribution and with a smaller average and minimum size.

By the way, we dutchmen have a more proper name for asteroids: "planetoiden", which means planet-like rather than star-like. Just depends on how close you get to them, I guess.