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Forum » SpaceEngine » Feedback and Suggestions » Comets and asteroids (Issues and implementations)
Comets and asteroids
DwardenDate: Thursday, 28.04.2011, 19:17 | Message # 1
Astronaut
Group: SE team
Czech Republic
Messages: 63
Status: Offline
Hello,

while the engine already supports both types
they seems unfinished and brings (at least predefined ones) performance hit

when i tried import 500 to 5000 asteroids it crawled the system to low numbers

when i tried import >500 comets same

also comets and asteroids seems to ignore any tries to make them non-spheric shape

comets are missing any visible tail(s) (in case of multiple stars in system they may have more tails and if memory serve me some our sol comets got double tail too)

so i'm wondering
what's reasonable amount of asteroids?
what's reasonable amount of coments?

will be there procedural asteroid fields?
will be there procedural comet clouds?
are there any ways how define procedural rings (e.g. sizes, numbers, probability of presence at gas giants and bigger / mass strong planets) ?



Ideas are like ocean w/o borders! https://twitter.com/FoltynD
 
SpaceEngineerDate: Friday, 29.04.2011, 13:23 | Message # 2
Author of Space Engine
Group: Administrators
Russian Federation
Messages: 4800
Status: Offline
Quote (Dwarden)
while the engine already supports both types they seems unfinished and brings (at least predefined ones) performance hit


Asteroids are already supported, but their shape generation is quite simple for now. I will improve it in a future release. Comets are the same as asteroids. But no tails are implemented yet.

Quote (Dwarden)
when i tried import 500 to 5000 asteroids it crawled the system to low numbers when i tried import >500 comets same


Hmm, it is possible. I've never tested the engine with that number of bodies. Can you send me your asteroids/comet catalogue? I'll test it and improve the code, then I'll include this catalogs in a future release. Type your copyright and data source at the beginning of the files:)
It is possible to implement calculation of orbital motion on GPU instead of CPU - it will boost perfomance so SpaceEngine can handle 500,000 asteroids and comets:)

Quote (Dwarden)
also comets and asteroids seems to ignore any tries to make them non-spheric shape


How are your trying to make them non-spherical? I found some strange behaviour in global shape noise function, if linear size of asteroid is less than several hundred kilometers. I will implement potato-like shaped generation of these later.

Quote (Dwarden)
will be there procedural asteroid fields? will be there procedural comet clouds?


"Asteroid field"? Don't you mean asteroid belt? It is possible to handle some hundreds and thousands of discrete asteroids (when I implement the GPU orbital code), but I have no idea how to handle billions of them. Billions of stars are not too hard to handle, because they are static. But asteroids or stones in the planetary rings move at different speeds, so static octree algorithm is not suitable here. I can only implement simple static asteroid belts or rings for now...

Quote (Dwarden)
are there any ways how define procedural rings (e.g. sizes, numbers, probability of presence at gas giants and bigger / mass strong planets) ?


You can define yourself, ring parameters, only for your self-defined planets, like in 'SolarSys.sc' catalog:

Rings
{
Texture "Jupiter-rings.*" // Texture, if miss, it generates procedurally
InnerRadius 102200 // inner radius
OuterRadius 227000 // outer radius
RotationPeriod 22.5 // rotation period in hours, rings rotates like rigid body for now
RotationOffset 180 // rotation phase in degrees, dont affects on that either for now
FrontBright 0.03 // brightness of front lighted side
BackBright 1.0 // brightness of shadow side (scattering by dust)
Density 0.03 // alpha blending value
Exposure 2.5 // global brightness
}

*



 
FlynnDate: Monday, 27.08.2012, 09:01 | Message # 3
Observer
Group: Users
United States
Messages: 11
Status: Offline
Hey there!

I've been swimming through the content of Space Engine over the past week or so and have been absolutely blown away by the quality in regards to image and performance. As it stands now I can see the program being used in classrooms for Astronomy, it's an excellent tool to share the wonders of the cosmos with others.

Like others though, I also have thoughts and opinions about what would better the program... though nearly all of them have been stated before so I figure it's better to revive a dead one than to clog up the forums with another "Internal cockpit/starship" thread. tongue

That being said;

I was thinking about the Asteroid Belt issue, concerning the catalog. I can see it being an issue if the program had to create and assign a catalog entry for each and every asteroid found, that way the player could come back and find the same asteroid spinning around the same planet... but is that depth necessary at this point?

Why not make the Asteroid belts entirely procedural? Player flies into Saturn's rings (for example) and they remain the same as they are now except instead of turning to points of light and then disappearing once you get to close, it randomly generates a mess of asteroids tumbling and slowly orbiting Saturn (or any other world/Asteroid belt). This way you don't end up with thousands of catalog entries for a single belt but a pre-defined set of parameters to generate and render a unique field each time it is visited and these parameters can be used for any/all belts visited. This way you still get 3D spinning/orbiting rocks that appear to be innumerable in the thousands but in reality are only a few dozen mid-resolution rocks actually being rendered/created at a time?

With a million + rocks floating around the rings of Saturn, who's really going to fault you for not allowing us to bookmark the location of one in particular so we can show it to our friends later? Just the fact that we can approach a planet's rings and actually zip around the debris would be amazing...

Unless... that isn't the issue of course.

My second thought, was along the same lines; Procedural Generation and in particular regarding a post i saw here in the suggestions box about cities on Planets. I just so happened to be watching a video a few minutes before rummaging through the posts here about a guy who wrote a code for that very same thing. Even better is they put up the instructions and code online for free so that anyone can use them. Perhaps it's too bulky for SE or who knows what but i figure if you hadn't given it much thought- this might be worth archiving until the time is right.

Quote

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-d2-PtK4F6Y



AAAnd my third suggestion was on Units/Conversions and more information on planetary atmospheres (we've got EVERYTHING nearly but compositions!) but i see both of those are well worn topics. biggrin

With that, thanks so much for all the work you have put into this program so far. I have been estatic since I have discovered it and have been sharing it with friends, co-workers, and family alike. Keep it up! The World, and more so, the Internet need more projects like these with such far-reaching goals.



PC: Intel Core i7 950 3.3 Ghz (3.02, 4Gb DDR3 RAM, ATI Radeon 6800 Series 1Gb
Pilot, stargazer, and future cosmonaut extraordinaire!

Edited by Flynn - Monday, 27.08.2012, 09:07
 
SpaceEngineerDate: Monday, 27.08.2012, 09:25 | Message # 4
Author of Space Engine
Group: Administrators
Russian Federation
Messages: 4800
Status: Offline
Flynn, the main trouble for procedural rings is not the catalog, but the computationally expensive animation for millions of debris. The Ring is not a solid body, each rock is moving at its velocity according to Kepler's laws. This was discussed many times earlier. Also, the rings of Saturn is not a huge mess of rocks like in the movies (even in BBC/Discovery movies!), but a thin (10 m!) layer of dust or snow.

*



 
sonoDate: Friday, 02.11.2012, 14:13 | Message # 5
Observer
Group: Users
United Kingdom
Messages: 11
Status: Offline
Well celestia running on my old computer could easily handel thousands of known asteroids, satellites and comets. once i added that content from the various mods/addons forums i would never go back.

its very interesting to have the orbits of all the asteroids and satellites on , or to track individual satellites / comets.

As far as i know also the catalogs for these objects are freely available.

I hope they do get added to space engine. As for procedurally generated asteroids im not sure if that would be worth the performance hit if it meant calculating all the orbits etc. But the known ones, definitely should be added. smile



Intel 3570k @ 4.4Ghz 8GB DDR3 ATI Radeon HD7970 3GB Vram OCZ 128gb Agility 3
 
SpaceEngineerDate: Friday, 02.11.2012, 17:51 | Message # 6
Author of Space Engine
Group: Administrators
Russian Federation
Messages: 4800
Status: Offline
SE can handle up to 10,000 bodies in the system, so you are welcome to make an addon smile



 
HarbingerDawnDate: Friday, 02.11.2012, 20:27 | Message # 7
Cosmic Curator
Group: Administrators
United States
Messages: 8717
Status: Offline
Quote (SpaceEngineer)
SE can handle up to 10,000 bodies in the system, so you are welcome to make an addon

Humanity has cataloged over 600,000 objects in the Sol system smile



All forum users, please read this!
My SE mods and addons
Phenom II X6 1090T 3.2 GHz, 16 GB DDR3 RAM, GTX 970 3584 MB VRAM
 
Forum » SpaceEngine » Feedback and Suggestions » Comets and asteroids (Issues and implementations)
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