Seriously. I'm starting a Blender file of nothing but garbage and space salvage. Here's the background to this crappy project:
Many, many times there have been posters asking for "space dust" in Vegastrike to serve as speed reference, like in Privateer; and I've been rudely shooting down their requests. My arguments were:
A) There IS not much dust in space to speak of.
B) At the speeds you travel it would pass you so fast you wouldn't see it anyways.
C) A 6-32 hex nut would probably go through your ship before it impacts your retina.
D) There are no speed references in space, so if you want to play a space game, get used to it.
Anyhow, lately a few counterarguments popped up in my head out of the blue:
A) In the Fourth Millenium, after spacefaring for generations, and being engaged in space mining and combat, maybe there would indeed be tons of orbiting crap around most planets. Most of it would be on the plane of the ecliptic, and ship navigation routes would avoid the thick of it. Morover, there'd be specially high densities of garbage around space mines and stations, due to human activity. The gravitational force for for a space station is so small that garbage orbiting it would probably take years to complete a revolution around it. For practical purposes, it just floats there.
B) Most space stations being on the ecliptic plane, you would slow down when approaching one, to avoid getting damage from floating crap. So you'd actually fly slowly enough to see the crap.
C) The shields would definitely help deflect 6-32 hex nuts, and even crowbars. But you'd still want to slow down in case you run into an old fridge, or a piece of ship hull.
D) Having to slow down when approaching space stations would help us appreciate their size. If you see the station growing in size very slowly, but the crap is hitting your windshield like bullets, you'll get the idea that the station is huge.
Here's the plan: Programming-wise the garbage field would be a cube or sphere around your ship where garbage is randomly spawned far ahead and deleted far behind of you. As we approach a space station the density of the crap, and the size of individual pieces, is increased gradually. It would never get so dense as to see more than one item at a time up-close, though the random distribution might allow you to see 2 or more items close together once in a blue moon. Ideally you wouldn't see an item of one type twice in a trip, or even in two consecutive trips, so we need a lot of little things.
Graphics-wise, each piece of garbage would have a single lesser LOD being a simple tetrahedron (4 triangles), so we can start showing a piece of garbage from such a distance as it's sub-pixel in apparent size. Approaching a station from the distance would show like a subtle "halo" around it. I can do that with a shader, now that Ogre integration is imminent. As you get closer and enter that halo, we fade in a "fog" effect, simply by turning on depth fog, in OGL, which substitutes for crap too far away to see as individual items, or even dots.
Implementation-wise, I'm thinking of keeping all the garbage in one bfxm that includes, say, 200 small meshes, so we don't overwhelm the user's hard disk drive --seeking tiny files all over the place. Once the bfxm is in the videocard's memory, all the garbage we'll ever need is there. All the meshes would be unwrapped onto a single texture, 1k by 1k. No reflectivity, radiosity baking or bump-maps here, come on!
The total triangle count ideally would be under 5k, so it doesn't load the graphics pipeline any more than having one extra fighter in a scene.I'm also thinking of having 4 categories of frequency and variety, versus size and potential damage to your ship:1) Tiny Filler Crap:
Very numerous meshes, say 100, in this category, but unrecognizably small and simple shapes, squares, triangles, long rectangles, L-shaped things, half a cube (3 sides), etceteras. They'd be also randomly scaled on one axis or another, and randomly colored, upon spawning, so as to increase their apparent variety. They'd be the most common crap, as well, and would do nothing at all to your ship when you "hit it", or even make a sound; --i.e. purely graphical.
If they average 10 triangles each, these 100 meshes add to 1k triangles.
This category is excempted of having a lesser LOD, as their triangle count is way too small to justify it.
2) Special Tiny Crap:
These would be textured and not changed in color or size by spawning.
They'd be fewer in numbers, say 30 meshes, and would be shown much less frequently than the filler variety of crap.
A running shoe, a boot, a banged up helmet, paper cups, McDonald's styrofoam containers and burger boxes, brooms, spent munition shells, rusty mufflers, a mattress, a lawn chair, pink flamingos, whatever. If we keep the average tri-count to about 33, 33 triangles x 30 meshes = 1k tris. So, we're up to 2 k.
3) Not so tiny crap:
Seldom shows up but if you're speeding when it does it might take out a shield or even damage your armor; and if you're not speeding it might still make a sound when it hits your ship. Still pretty simple in terms of geometry, and not necessarily bigger, but surely more massive. Could include a fridge, an anvil, a warped I beam, an excavator shovel, a gas tank, radioactive and toxic waste barrels. A dozen such items at 83 tris average will take another 1k tris out of our budget. We've got 2k tris left to play with.
4) Space Salvage:
This category would number say 14 item types of 142 tris average, thus the remaining 2k tris. They should look like technical junk, that is, greeblish, representing the insides of destroyed ships. Unlike the other categories, they'd be targetable and have a nominal market value if tractored in. They might even include random assortments of spare parts if your ship is damaged and you have a repair bot. They'd serve another purpose too: To show behind holes left in the armor of ships when damaged in combat, so they really need to look like the stuff you'd see inside a ship: Framing, pipes, electrical boxes, tanks, whatever.
So, that's it: 5k tris.
Actually, we've gone a bit overbudget due to the LOD's for categories 2 through 4. 30 + 12 + 14 meshes = 56 meshes. 56 x 4 triangles per LOD comes to 224 tris, so the real grand-total is 5224 tris
To the above categories I'd add a Category 0 (zero) being a particle system to represent garbage too small to see in detail even when it hits your window.
Standards:
Mesh contributions to be 1 Meter per grid unit. Wavefront .obj. + .mtl.
Textures... 1 cm square pixels, typical. I'm thinking, if we were to divide a 1k by 1k texture into 64 squares, for simplicity (we have 56 textured meshes total), that's 8 rows x 8 columns. 1024/8=128, so each texture could be 128x128 on average, --some 64 x 64, some 256x256. Let's use a png with alpha channel, though, so we can put holes on the meshes using transparency, to increase the apparent complexity.
Conclusion: Asking for space dust to serve as speed reference remains a bad idea any way you look at it: Inconsistent with the reality of space, can't be "stationary" since there is no way to define the term --with respect to what?--; would fail to serve its intended purpose as our speeds are too high to see it; and the goal of having a speed reference in space is unwarranted. But garbage near space stations, space factories and mines, as well as ship leftovers are more justifiable. As we slow down to dock with a station we are traveling slow enough to see it. It is stationary relative to the station it orbits, and/or relative to the orbit it traces around the planet, which is roughly the same orbit we're on when approaching a station. And it provides us with a speed reference *when* we actually need one in order to appreciate sizes and scales: near our departure and destination points.
Politics and conspiracies:
In spite of continuous public education campaigns, space garbage continues to accumulate. Is the public really at fault, or the public sector?
Landfills on Earth are already overflowing in early 21st century; imagine in the timeframe of Vegastrike. With virtually free costs for lifting stuff to orbit due to fusion energy and space elevators, there's every incentive for local politicians and industry polluters to ship their crap up to geo and let go of it there, while whistling...
Comments and suggestions welcome before work begins.
