May/June 2011 Lite Challenge Entry - Rayr 2 Orbital Analysis

**Greel** · 06-07-2011, 01:28 AM

A bit of a late entry (I forgot the Lite Challenge existed) but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to play around in space.

I'm going for a Star Trek main viewscreen style look here as a ship approaches a planet to determine how viable it is for Fuel Gel extraction, a highly unstable material which posses extraordinarily high energy output when burned. Even the sun's rays during the day time are potent enough to ignite Fuel Gel, so mining can only commence during the night hours of a planet.

###LATEST WIP###
planetary_survey_WIP_1.jpg

**Troedel** · 06-07-2011, 07:52 AM

Looks very good and promising. Go get it!
The overlay seems to take hold...

**Master TMO** · 06-07-2011, 10:41 AM

One of the things I'm glad about in my challenge submission is that I won't have to post all those spatial survey statistics. I think I can generally understand what everybody is posting in their maps, but there's no way I know enough to make up my own believable stats.

All the submissions are looking good, too.

One question, are the golden lines Fuel Gel deposits, or coastlines? When I first saw the thumbnail, I thought it was coastlines, but looking closer it looks like it might be indicating the Gel.

**Greel** · 06-07-2011, 11:19 AM

Yeah, those are the Fuel Gel deposits.

The stats part was the easiest part, being in love with space and astronomy, I wrote a small flash program that randomly generates planets, so I just generated a couple until I liked the results, copied and pasted

The really small text (I'll assume you were talking about the stuff in the corner) was just supposed to be fluff, I wasn't even going to have real text, but even at that size it was readable enough that if I just put gibberish it would have been very noticeable. But I got rid of those windows as I didn't really like them.

**Steel General** · 06-07-2011, 11:19 AM

Looks like a fine start, but even at full resolution some of the smaller text is a bit hard to read.

**jtougas** · 06-07-2011, 04:21 PM

Very Nice. Mining seems to be popular this time around.

**Greel** · 06-07-2011, 06:02 PM

I wasn't liking the way it was looking so I completely redid the style of the HUD. I think it looks sleeker now with a more unified color scheme, and a definite boarder between viewscreen and HUD.

###LATEST WIP###
planetary_survey_WIP_2.jpg

**walterful** · 06-07-2011, 07:19 PM

(In my best George Takei impersonation) Oh my...

That's a fantastic revision, I love the new HUD. All of this new competition, perhaps I should revisit my entry...

Though I am sad you named the nebula; I really kinda liked the lazy apathy of "Some Nebula."