i'm still not seeing any stars feeding on each other when they're close together. shouldn't the more massive one have a gas tendril from the less massive one?
i'm also still not seeing any accretion disks on the videos of black holes i've seen, they're all just a gravity lensing effect and then a little black dot. shouldn't at least some of them have the same sort of four-dimensional "you can see the front and the back like it's a figure 8 but with more dimensions" dust/gas disk?
i'm also still not seeing any accretion disks on the videos of black holes i've seen, they're all just a gravity lensing effect and then a little black dot. shouldn't at least some of them have the same sort of four-dimensional "you can see the front and the back like it's a figure 8 but with more dimensions" dust/gas disk?
What I can say is that geometrically the accretion disc is quite a simple object. In the thin disc approximation it is simply that - a thin disc with a slight flare to it, like two round dinner plates stuck back to back. So the geometry is fairly straightforward. Texturing shouldn't be too difficult - these are discs of hydrogen, so they won't look too dissimilar to the star textures already in game. They are very hot in the centre and cool as you move to the edges, so you basically would want a gradient version of the existing star temperatures, transitioning from something hot and blue in the middle to a cooler star texture around the edge. It will have a sort of corona, which is already implemented for stars, and will be a bit wispy around the edges rather than ending abruptly: again, the diffuse edges of the current stars in game would do the job. So a bit of fiddling with what is basically already in game would get you a very reasonable accretion disc that would suit most people. Astronomers might start pushing for more detailed modelling, like ellipticity and spiral structure, but we're in the minority 