Explorable Planetary Rings

Here's my suggestion for a new type of environment to explore: Planetary rings. Now, before anyone tries to correct me, yes, I know that in real life planetary rings are actually made of millions of lumps of rock/ice/whatever, but lets just imagine them as solid strips of land just for the sake of gameplay.

With each planet you encounter, there is a chance that it will also have a ring around it, which you can choose to land on and explore. The ring would share features that the planet itself has in terms of plants and geometry, but they would be generally flatter, have less wildlife, and weaker gravity. The ring would be very thin, and perhaps have some common ore or ice in the centre. If you dig through to the other side, then either:

• Gravity would flip and you could walk on the underside of the ring
• You would keep falling until you hit the underside of the ring on the opposite side of the planet.
• You would keep falling and loop around to where you dug (omitting the ring on the opposite side of the planet, just imagine you fell past it or something)
• You would DIE.

The first two points I very much doubt would work as the would involve turning the terrain upside down, which would probably be crazy difficult to code. The third i think might work, sure, it probably violates real-life physics like nothing else, but it would allow the map to loop both vertically and horizontally, which could be very interesting/useful for building. The final point is really just for if none of the other ideas work.

Here's some ideas of different variations of planetary rings:

​

Forest rings​

​

Ice ring​

​

Tentacle ring​

Thank you for reading my suggestion, i'll update this if I think of anything else, and if anyone has any ideas to help improve this suggestion, feel free to share them!

 

I immediately remembered Larry Niven's "Ringworld"
I had something alike in mind, but I was too lazy to post it

 

I think that's a really clever idea! There could be ruined spaceships on the rings as well, which have crashed into the ring. They would be filled with loot, and maybe some space pirates who have gone insane/mutated?

I think there should be some kind of rare ore on the rings as well. It is called...Ringium!

I like the tentacle ring idea as well. It could be used for massive boss fights, in which you have to run across the ring, starting up turrets of some kind, that will fire upon the planet-sized monster which has infested the planet below. In fact, that could work with any ring!

 

Scrith ?:alien:

 

Ringium sounds better

 

I agree

 

i love this idea! could it be that you walk on the outside of the ring, and when you dig through you fall to the planet? (although that would mean the orientation would change, more like a Ringworld than an actual ring)

 

Pretty Boss.
I wanna do this!

 

Awesome idea, and a little bit of creative liberty taking never hurt anyone! It would be great to give some more distinctly different areas to explore. I do think however that dying might just be the best option if you dug all the way through. Flipping gravity has been discussed in the thread about having actual round planets, and it would probably be way too complex to code, as you said. And once a player had done it once they'd know never to do it again

N.B. If you did have vertical looping as well, would your velocity continue to build like in Portal if you kept looping continuously? Would be funny to build up to some immense speed and see how much fall damage I could get up to.

 

bahaha it sounds awsome

 

Damn that tenticle ring looks so epic.
This is a very cool idea Flu, realism schmelism.
But it would be cool if you could go onto a ring that just contains thousands of pieces of space rock, where you can jump
inbetween them, they would also contain minerals and such.

 

mabie not all rings should match there planets?

 

Perhaps there would be a ring that actually is just rocks and ice lumps. then you would have to jump from rock to rock or use a hoverbike.

 

I like that idea. It would make planets a lot more diverse.

 

This is a fantastic idea, as many have pointed out. This is one I wish we could directly have the programmers look at this. Having rare ring boss battles would make a fantastic addition to any boss battles they are already planning.

 

Nice idea, I also like the asteroid ring idea.

 

It's Halo 4!

 

Make it a no gravity, with floating clumps of matter. Having it be essentially the same as the planet environment would be boring.

 

Maybe instead of the rings having the same environment as the planet, it could just be a thin collection of dirt, rock, and ice. I don't really think trees and animals could exist on the rings outside of the planet's atmosphere.
That is unless they all wore space helmets.

 

AWESOMENESS

Does one of the rings rule them all?