Rings!

[rigelan]

I just happened into vegastrike again today. It'd been a month or two since I'd been in the game. I happened across a gas planet that had rings. And the rings looked good! I like it. The rings don't show through the backside of the planet, and they get in the way of the frontside. Plus, if you look close, there's a moon.

[chuck_starchaser]

That's great! Very nice!
What I don't like is the fact that the stripes in the planet go one way and the rings another way.
Would there be a way to force rings' axis to always line up with the planet's axis?
It should. No exceptions.

[pyramid]

Would there be a way to force rings' axis to always line up with the planet's axis?
It should. No exceptions.

Yeah. One of the things that I wanted to tackle after CineMut is done. This is because I think that some adjustment on lighting statements might be required with CineMut enabled (no spec color statement?). Once I start looking into the system files I want to clean all things together. The rings orientation, distances between planets so that rings don't overlap nearby planets, planet rotational axis that should be aligned with the texture, and maybe some other things.
Btw, the planet.inc download on my Space3D website has a PovRay script (vegastrike_rings) that let you generate a sequence of randomly colored and spaced rings which anybody can use to further improve the variety of the existing rings. The script is also available in the svn under masters/textures/rings/sources. AT the time I just did 8 different rings for vs. If somebody feels annoyed by such few, it is a piece of cake to add more of them

[rigelan]

@chuck

I would agree to that. The axis perpendicular to the rings should match the axis perpendicular to the cloud-stripes on the planet. I'm pretty sure the planet texture has the stripes exactly horizontal.

I would also propose that moons should also be close to or in the same plane as the rings.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moons_of_Jupiter
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moons_of_Saturn
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moons_of_Uranus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moons_of_Neptune

Uranus' major satellites seem to have an inclination of less than 5 degrees from Uranus' equator. (Moons 1-18)
There do seem to be little satellites that fly all over the place though. (Moon 19-27)
The only exception seems to be Triton (of Neptune), which has an inclination of 150 degrees.
Although, that may be tougher to accomplish than merely orienting a planet with its rings.

[chuck_starchaser]

Makes sense. The coplanarity of orbits is not due to an impossibility of objects getting trapped into any random orbit, but
more due to the probability of such objects to collide with other objects. But in far away orbits there's less stuff to collide
with, plus orbital periods extend to many years; and so odd orbital planes and even retrograde orbits can last a lot longer.