Gas Giants

[FluffyFreak]

Damn, I'll need to make myself a GitHub account, maybe then I could not only just track issues by myself, but also contribute to development.

That would be awesome, more contributors are always welcome.
It's easy to come along and recommend things but we're more limited by time and resources than we are by ideas or problems to fix - actually we seem to have an infinite number of problems to fix! ;)

Though regarding being privy to how things should work, we could really use people with actual background in that stuff.
I know a bit about molecular biology, but other than that I'm pretty much just an avid science geek.

We just do the best we can, it's good when we do get someone come along who can explain why we've gotten things wrong, until then we just get the as correct as we know how.

Your suggestion for fixing the Gas Giant radius is good and I'll look into it as soon as I can.
There should probably be a different category for Neptune and Uranus since they're technically Ice Giants and the maths is different for those as well it seems. Fascinating what you discover when you start looking into this stuff, I've been into space and planets my whole life and everyday I still learn something, or recently updated/discovered.

[FluffyFreak]

@FluffyFreak: ...just want to say "thank you thank you thank you!" for testing your stuff on the open source drivers! :)

For future reference it's our old friend "EE r600_shader.c:155 r600_pipe_shader_create - translation from TGSI failed !" again :(

[DraQ]

Is it hard to make fog effect while descending into gas giant? And then that fog slightly and rapidly change color? Is it hard to make small core that would be like diameter of earths moon and all above till real gas giant size would just be just that dense fog? So at half way ship would just be crushed by atmosphere of that gas giant?

I think that it would prove unfeasible for technical reasons.

Also, gas giants may have small cores, but they have awfully thick layer of liquid/supercritical hydrogen, sometimes underlain with a layer of metallic hydrogen.

I wonder if there is ability to land on star if there would be strong enough engine. Because now only speed can kill. I really though that other ways of causing ship destruction was already implemented in Pioneer but it is not. Weird.

True. I think Pioneer should have at least two other modes of destruction implemented - heat from outside sources (integrated with hull heating on reentry) and pressure.

Then making gas giants would only be a question of giving them atmospheres that would be thick enough to crush you before you hit the 'surface'.

P.S. You could land on gas giant in both FE2 and FFE.
Been there, done that.

Your suggestion for fixing the Gas Giant radius is good and I'll look into it as soon as I can.

Hopefully this can be helpful as far as mass/radius relationship goes:
http://phl.upr.edu/library/notes/standa ... exoplanets

We also need fixing the atmospheres - most planets that can hold onto hydrogen and helium snowball into gas giants, and we should check if the planet is massive or cool enough to hold different gasses and revise the atmosphere list and selection mechanics. For example, we won't get hydrogen or helium apart from maybe some failed gas giants (still massive by terrestrial standards), I'm not sure if we'll ever get enough argon to get reasonable argon atmospheres and so on.

There should probably be a different category for Neptune and Uranus since they're technically Ice Giants and the maths is different for those as well it seems. Fascinating what you discover when you start looking into this stuff, I've been into space and planets my whole life and everyday I still learn something, or recently updated/discovered.

Are they different enough from our POV? basically the difference between gas giant and non-gas giant is whether the planet could gorge itself on hydrogen and helium.

There are some other fixes that need to be made:
Lighting should depend on distance from light source, billboards are rendered under naive assumption that something not resolvable is not visible (which is just untrue for bright enough objects, otherwise we wouldn't be able t6o see any stars at night at all (or most planets, or artificial satellites), temperature is calculated wrong in cases where a body orbits a dim star which itself orbits a bright star closely enough (get contributions from all stars in the system when calculating the temperature), and is there any reason why we don't get gravitational influence from multiple bodies in the system?

Anyway, regarding clouds, what is the professional way of doing them?
I can think of a mesh with particles in vertices, and mesh normals used to calculate lighting on those particles, but it's probably smarter than that?

[Tichy]

@FluffyFreak: ...just want to say "thank you thank you thank you!" for testing your stuff on the open source drivers! :)

For future reference it's our old friend "EE r600_shader.c:155 r600_pipe_shader_create - translation from TGSI failed !" again :(

l always test pioneer with eclipse enabled every time I recieve mesa and kernel updates, just to see if there are improvements. But unfortunatalely, the latest mesa (10.1.0) and kernel (3.14.1) I tried, can't reder those shaders correctly. :(

[FluffyFreak]

Yeah I'm a bit disappointed, I really hoped they'd have fixed this by now :(

[robn]

Its quite possible that nobody else has reported it. If we can reduce it down to a small test case, we can get it fixed.

[FluffyFreak]

Good point, I have no idea how to find out what exactly is the cause of the problem though, or how to extract it into a simple test case since it seems to be a complexity error.
Like we're hitting some limit on the complexity of the shaders. Simple shaders won't show the problem I suspect because it can shuffle registers, instruction and memory around to cope.