Oh, BK. You actually got it right. For speheres it’s easy, since you can use their position to determine which one to draw first. And for the ring of the saturn, it will get a bit more complicated, but not with visual errors.
And to game fun:
I can’t imagine a game to be fun where you’ll have to fly around between real planets in a galaxy. If you wanted to move between two planets, you’d need to be VERY fast, but then, if you’d have enemy space ships, it won’t come to a fight, since you’d have to be WAY TO FAST FOR A FIGHT… I mean, if you’ll have a speed of a few thousands of meters per second, and your spaceship is 20 or 40 meters long and the enemies aren’t bigger, you won’t even see them.
You’re right… But I’m not talking about doing a completely realistic game this time around. But I would like to be able to make a game where particular battles take place over a really HUGE planet so that it “feels” like you’re really in orbit over a REALLY BIG planet. But still be able to move towards and away from the planet to some degree. I suppose you’re on to a good idea here as to just disabling the depth buffer when drawing objects like these. I just wonder now what the best method would be to allow the user to fly around but not actually allow them to collide with the planet. I guess I could just simply stop their movement when they get too close but that makes a game feel really fake. I suppose a SUPER cool thing to do (although it’d be SUPER hard too) would be to actually allow the user to fly down into the atmosphere of the planet and actually cruise the terrain. 
I’m probably getting a bit ahead of myself now. But you’re right about the rings of Saturn… That’d be a pretty difficult situation to deal with. But for the game I have in mind, I’m thinking about drawing Saturn without the depth buffer, and then drawing “asteroid” looking things (actual polygon objects) in a belt-type arrangement and the combat would actually take place in the rings. That way I can get away from the whole problem of disabling the depth buffer when drawing the rings.
So, I still have yet another question: what is the best data structure to use to organize my objects that will allow for the easiest and quickest depth sorting and is OpenGL friendly?
Maybe a great array of triangles, and indices to it for every object. Hmmm.
At least destroyed starships could burn away in the atmosphere… I’ve been thinking about thousand cool effects, but I think that is a mistake. If one has every little complicated effect in mind, you won’t get started…
Anyway, I’m currently simply working on my windows routines and my own intern gl windows implementation. It’s limited, but I’ll need to write some mesh-editing progs ingame and it will help a lot, I think.
Is anybode used to 3dsmax or a modeler that can export it?
[This message has been edited by Michael Steinberg (edited 12-06-2000).]