GSim 0.28.01

[testtubegames]

I'm staring in awe now... the dust will be a beautiful feature.
Will we be able to give the dust custom colors? How will it work with saves?
I remember how I mentioned a 'shatter' collision mod, too. Perhaps dust and *small* planets with mass could be spawned then?

Plus the stars illuminate now? Sweet! (I just hope the saves now flag planets as stars )

Right? Blew my mind how different it is to watch dust vs. a few asteroids.

Custom colors wouldn't be a problem at all for the dust. And I'm still not sure about saves, in the first iteration, the dust won't be included in the saves. Thinking longer-term that just the next update, though, it would be far too much data to save the positions of each piece of dust (since you can easily draw thousands). Maybe the sim could capture a rough idea of it in the save? Maybe log a simplified listing of where the mouse was each half-second that you were adding dust.

But then again, that method would make the dust look different whenever anyone loads it (my name might not have the same sharp edges, say). Which means you'd lose some of the effect of what you made.

I'll be interested to hear if you all have ideas once you start playing around with it. I never really know how a feature is gonna be used until I get it in your hands

Stars (*and* planet stars ) do illuminate. Very basic effect, but between that and the dust, the sim looks quite a bit snazzier.

[A Random Player]

Custom colors wouldn't be a problem at all for the dust. And I'm still not sure about saves, in the first iteration, the dust won't be included in the saves. Thinking longer-term that just the next update, though, it would be far too much data to save the positions of each piece of dust (since you can easily draw thousands). Maybe the sim could capture a rough idea of it in the save? Maybe log a simplified listing of where the mouse was each half-second that you were adding dust.

But then again, that method would make the dust look different whenever anyone loads it (my name might not have the same sharp edges, say). Which means you'd lose some of the effect of what you made.

Procedural generation, of course! Pick a random salt after each reset, so dust isn't the same every time. Use a pseudorandom number generator for things such as speeds and angles. Ex. MD5 hash the time rounded to .01 concatenate " " concatenate salt, and extract some randomness from that. Would probably be a lot more processing intensive though.

[exfret]

Why not just have a circle of dust generated somehow that's generated the same way each time? I mean, when I make must dust clouds, I just want them to be dust clouds. I don't want to get a different one every time. I also don't care much about the dragging feature. I would just want to make a circle of dust. You can do that quickly and either have a laggier freeform dust mode or leave it off for later, or someone will find a solution to this problem and you don't have to do either of these.

[testtubegames]

Procedural generation, of course! Pick a random salt after each reset, so dust isn't the same every time. Use a pseudorandom number generator for things such as speeds and angles. Ex. MD5 hash the time rounded to .01 concatenate " " concatenate salt, and extract some randomness from that. Would probably be a lot more processing intensive though.

Hmm... that would definitely work for a certain type of dust, if you added a whole big cloud at once. In fact, I'm interested in adding in quick ways to add a swirl of planets, say, or a disk of asteroids. So your idea for saving a seed-randomness would be a nice way to have those things be duplicated precisely.

The dust as it stands, though, is added much more precisely. Basically you click and drag the mouse to add it wherever you'd like, and it adds a trail of dust. So really, it's less like an 'auto dust cloud' and more like 'spam the solar system with tons of stuff.'

The new version has been posted in the meantime, so you can play around with the dust yourself and see what I mean.

Why not just have a circle of dust generated somehow that's generated the same way each time? ...I also don't care much about the dragging feature. I would just want to make a circle of dust.

I can certainly add a way to make a huge cloud all at once. I would have agreed with you about the dragging feature... until I tried it. It's really fun