Ringworlds, system-wide asteroid belts, accretion disks, anything!
As a very simple example, the standard sun_disc_0.png file, which is the sun texture, is 203x203 pixels, this makes up the suns ingame.
Now, if the game allowed larger files, but kept the effective game-sun size at those 203x203 pixels (such as to prevent any selection when clicked outside those 203x203 pixels etc), we could make a larger .png and add stuff outside.
I've included an example below, where i just enlarged the current sun_disc_0.png (while keeping the sun disc the same 203x203 size, and added a hasty ringworld attempt around it, which would, if displayed ingame in my requested manner, show up as an independent ring around the sun quite some distance out (among the planets).
This would obviously just be a visual mod, since it'd be part of the sun in game-terms. But there's nothing stopping us from doing the same with a PLANET, then (if the editor allowed it, and allowed us to classify specific planet textures as "ultra rare") placing that planet inside the sun, with the actual planet erased out in the .png, leaving nothing but the distant ringworld now surrounding the star, with its own independent game-stats like a planet would have.
Now there is 1 more thing, how to select it? If the game (perhaps it already does this, i dont know) checked the transparency of the .png below the mouse cursor, it could be made such that one can only select something if the object below the mouse cursor is opague.
Hence, when hovering over the opague ringworld, the "system-wide planet" would be selected, when hovering inside it in the transparent invisible bit, it wouldnt be selected, and simply act as if it wasnt there.
This would be particularly interesting to do with a system wide asteroid belt, everything could be transparent except for individual small asteroids covering the entire circumferance, and if the game only recognized the opague part of the object as an asteroid (even if they all had exactly the same stats ingame, same materials, it'd be awesome), little mining ships could happily mine away at whatever opague asteroids they were closest to.
Please Elliot, give us the methods we need to do the modding that we expected on release [&o]
