Science of the Spheres

Over the past few days I’ve been making a system to procedurally generate small asteroids and comets in space. This can happen anywhere, be it in a solar system or in interstellar space. Each asteroid also uses a similar terrain generation technique to the planets, so every single one is unique.

I need to work some more on the noise parameters though, as they all look pretty samey right now. But overall, it’s nice to see some activity in an otherwise currently very inactive universe.

Which brings me to a very interesting occurrence that happened when I left the generator running for a while to see if anything broke…

I wasn’t around for the event but when I came back to check on it, the debug trails immediately pointed out something odd. One of the asteroids had actually ricocheted off a planet’s surface, then had been gently tugged into a semi-stable orbit by the other planets of the system.

^{(Animated at 4x normal speed)}

I ran the game at accelerated time for what must have been a several hours of game-time. The thing kept periodically bumping into the planet’s surface and then being tugged into an orbit again by the same process that captured it originally. Eventually though, the perturbations brought it inexorably to its demise…

Though, even impacting the surface didn’t really make the thing give up. It skipped and skidded across the planet’s surface for a good several minutes before I stopped the game and ended its torment. I have retroactively named this asteroid “Greg” after Grigori Rasputin, who also would just not give up.

So there you have it – the first documented “moon” in SotS. A good example of how chaotic “orbits” end up being in this universe.