Suggestion, may be possible

[clockworks]

I think it would be great if the rings of your planet or the circumstellar disk would eventually accumulate into each other to form bigger bodies, if they don't already.
if this already happens or is not possible never mind

[FiahOwl]

I think it would be great if the rings of your planet or the circumstellar disk would eventually accumulate into each other to form bigger bodies, if they don't already.
if this already happens or is not possible never mind

I hope Dan adds the ability for dust to accumulate into bodies in a later update.

And if the rings are inside the Roche limit, they shouldn't form rings.

[smjjames]

At this time it's not possible, however there is a new collision system coming in a major update next spring sometime, so, I have no idea.

I think Dan has considered this as a possibility in a future update.

[Bla]

The problem is that currently particles/dust (in rings, galaxies...) are masless points, so they can't collide like normal bodies do when they merge, and they don't have any mass. If they had mass, they would slow the simulation about as much as normal bodies, I think, and then they would be pointless (now in both senses of the word).

Particles would probably need to have a volume to make it possible for them to combine, or to determine if they should combine to some "bigger" particle or a massive body depending on how close several particles are to each other.
I don't know how they could determine the mass either, when the particles could represent anything from dust in planetary rings to stars in galaxies. Maybe based on the body they orbit (if they orbit any)?
There could be an option to choose how much "potential mass" a ring could have, and then each particle could have that "mass" divided by the number of particles. But the mass won't become real before it becomes an object, which it does after several particles have merged... And all the "potential masses" of those objects have been added to each other as well. Then the program just has to decide what a collission is when it is between points with no volume.

[Darvince]

The massless points when touching could form a very low mass object (for space), like 10 million kilograms.

[vh]

yeah but massless points are also...sizeless? i'm pretty sure they have a single position, so they can't really collide/ have a 1 in a trillion chance of doing so. Even the word point suggests they're... a single point

edit: lol i just say much of what bla said.

you mean touching as "visually" in contact? points stay the same size when you zoom in or out so that wouldn't really work. A dust size changer slider would be nice for changing the size.

[Dan Dixon]

Yes, currently, the massless points are also sizeless as well.

We're considering different ways to make this work. Bla's suggestion is a good one, and likely similar to the direction we'll go.