[EM] Dyson Sphere/Ring

[PLBever]

Hey all,

Had a random thought during a flyby of planets rings and thought to myself "would it be possible to mod a Dyson Ring instead of just planet rings?". Ive looked at some of the other mods for rings and found that the rings are flat renderings.

So would it be possible to create a mod that would add a 3-D image around an entire planet? And if so, how could one go about doing this?

[Mojo]

Not without fundamentally altering the game code, no. The engine's fundamental programming is such that it simply renders what it's programmed to render, either the default rings or whatever (properly named) .dds file it finds in the /rings subdirectory, using black as the transparency.

The only current method for making the rings prettier would be to up the resolution of those .dds files. The problem you have is somewhat explained by the file extension -- DirectDraw Surface. You'd have to create an entire 3D model of a Dyson ring or Dyson sphere to get it into the game, as opposed to merely applying a direct surface rendering to a specific coordinates.

And that's not even getting into the imperfect solutions to actually UV mapping a sphere -- try folding a standard Mercator projection map around a basketball and see if you can get it to conform perfectly to a round 3D object -- creating those annoying puckers you see at the poles of generally spheroid objects such as asteroids in game which I whimsically call "space anus", which often involve wonky hacks to fix.

Simpler solution? Install .dds plugin for Photoshop -> Open Photoshop -> New image -> 8000x8000 -> Black foreground/white background -> filter-> render -> clouds -> filter -> distort -> twirl -> ctrl-f ctrl-f ctrl-f ctrl-f -> filter -> add noise... -> Gaussian 10% -> elliptical marquee -> delete center portion, black -> elliptical marquee -> invert selection -> delete outer portion, black -> colorize -> save as... -> EvochronMercenary/rings/rings*.dds

Trust me, even that makes the rings far, far prettier. Spend a little time with the brush tool and it looks even better.

[Letoras]

putting asteroids around will "suffocate" our hardware, right?

[Maarschalk]

putting asteroids around will "suffocate" our hardware, right?

LOL....pretty much, the bad cholestrol of a GPU.....:P:P:P:P:P

[Letoras]

putting asteroids around will "suffocate" our hardware, right?

LOL....pretty much, the bad cholestrol of a GPU.....:P:P:P:P:P

:D:D:D
Something like that alright!!!! I do get 87-93 degrees allready from the gpu.

You can have a feeling of a "fat" ring (sorry can't find the proper words now) with multiple planes i suppose.

[Edited on 28-1-2012 by Letoras]

[PLBever]

Well I've been reading about Vice's upcoming expansion. Perhapes a full blown Dyson Ring could be implemented.

For those who don't know what exactly a Dyson Ring is, it is a ring that spins along the entire habital region of the host star. A sphere would completely envelope the host star, blocking out all light from the outside while all the light on the inside is harvest for a potentionally unlimited supply of solar power.

The enormity of such a thing COULD be implemented if the base code of the game was edited, but that is something more for Vice to decide.

[Mojo]

Dyson rings aren't overly hard to do. Shores of Hazeron has them implemented fairly well, and that game can barely manage to get player models to animate correctly.

[Viper]

I do get 87-93 degrees allready from the gpu.

I certainly hope that is not measured in Centigrade, or you'd better start putting aside some money for a new one lol.