Ribbons for RSS

[soundnfury]

RealSolarSystem is great.  Unistrut's Ribbons are great.  But what if... we could combine them?

I'm working on a ribbon set (and, hopefully, eventually, a generator) for the planets and moons in RealSolarSystem.  I've done a first draft and composited a layout:

Above: the ribbon layout (using Earth bars for the Asteroid ribbon).  Below: the same, with labels.  (Charon is defined but disabled in RSS.)

I'm open to suggestions regarding both the colour choices and the layout.  Particular things I've had trouble with:

• Jupiter.  It's hard to pick two colours to represent the planet's banded atmosphere.  I guess the red bars represent the Spot?  Also, I've just noticed that technically the bars on the Jovian moons are the wrong way round - but I think it's actually better that way.
• Saturn's moons.  Five of them (Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea) are basically grey and icy.  Enceladus is pushing into white, but that still leaves four rather similar moons.  Indeed, I had to cheat a bit and make Dione's bars a stylised representation of the "wispy terrain" (ice cliffs), just to stop it being identical to Rhea.
  • Incidentally, take a good look at Titan and you may notice it's a bit fuzzy.  That represents the fact that Titan is the only moon with a thick atmosphere.
• I was lazy with Mars and just copied the Duna colours from the original.  As Mars doesn't have oversized ice caps, I should probably change it.
  • Phobos and Deimos are also rather similar: both resemble carbonaceous asteroids.  The current colour means that if you lose a Kerbal at Phobos, no-one will be able to tell.  (Black bar on a black backgroud isn't the most contrastive of combinations...)  EDIT: I've recoloured them, they're now different enough and Phobos isn't black any more.  It's still fairly dark though - it has one of the lowest albedos in the Solar System, though RSS doesn't seem to reflect that (pun intended).

Of course if you want to use these, you'll probably need the source layers.  Get them from the XCF.  EDIT: Or scroll down a few posts to find the generator.

As an example, this is my progress in my current RSS/RP-0 save:

RSS and Ribbons: two great tastes that taste great together!

Edited January 11, 2016 by soundnfury
Use ISP ribbons for example image

[NathanKell]

Awesome!

[Ezriilc]

I've just updated my Ribbon Generator git repository to my latest, and changed the license to allow unrestricted use.

Please let me know if I can be of any help.  I might even be able to provide hosting if needed.

[soundnfury]

The RSS Ribbonator is now live!

Go to http://jttlov.no-ip.org:8080/ to generate your ribbons, or download from GitHub and run it yourself.

Unlike the Kerbaltek generator, The RSS Ribbonator doesn't save your selections.  Instead, they're encoded in the URL of the image (and a 'job card' URL you can bookmark, so you don't have to re-enter it all when you want to add a new device).  This means I don't need lots of storage, but I do have to generate the image on-the-fly every time it's requested.  Moreover, if you add new devices, any old links won't be updated.  Also, I'm hosting this on my desktop PC, so it may get slow if lots of people use it.  Therefore, if you have image hosting you can use, please host your generated image yourself to save my poor PC from the load.  Also, of course, that will avoid the old-links problem.

Please note that the web interface is in beta and might break or disappear at any time.  Also, I know it's ugly and takes a lot of scrolling, but I'm not much of a web dev, and I don't feel like tackling a Javascript interface.

[NathanKell]

Awesome! You should definitely let people know in the RSS and the RO threads (if you haven't already).

[soundnfury]

I've improved the generator with a little bit of JS so that the form is no longer tall enough to use as a space elevator

It hides the bulk of a body's options if "Reached SOI" is unchecked, and totally hides any moon whose parent planet's SOI is unreached.

Hopefully that should make the Ribbonator easier to use.