When I am logged into VO on my Asus ee pad transformer (Android), I cannot mine. No matter how close I get to the asteroid, it always says that it is too far away to mine. I have gotten as close as 9 meters.

Never mind. As I got into the game on my PC, I remembered why I stopped playing. It's not that great. Thanks anyway.

This sounds like it could be a latency (i.e. internet connection) issue. It works fine on my Xperia PLAY.

I doubt it is a latency issue. I am on a 30 Mb/s down and 4 Mb/s up network that has never failed me with any other game. Unless the vendetta servers themselves were lagging, and only when I was on with my tablet, then I seriously doubt that was it.

Perhaps you targeted a very large asteroid, in which case you sometimes need to be basically touching it to mine.

That may be the case. I tried many and they were of varying sizes. If that were the case, it would appear to be a problem anyway. A problem that should be addressed. I don't see how one could measure distance from the center point of an object to the center point of another object. This would be incredibly inaccurate, especially in a space sim. You should always measure the distance between the outerbounds of the closest bounds (or the bounds facing each other) of the two objects in question using ray-casting or something similar, in the case of measuring closeness. Or measure from center to center taking into consideration the approximate radius of each object.

One of the reasons they measure from center-to-center is to reduce the number of calculations that need to be performed by the server, and so improve server stability. VO has one of the most stable, lag-free servers of any online game that I've seen, and I believe it's due in part to the structure of the game. While I agree it would be ideal to measure the distance between the outer bounds of each object, network robustness should not be sacrificed for this cause, if this were the case.

Any time you target an object, it gives the distance to that object in the top right hand corner of the screen, so the information is readily available. Whenever I sidle up to a larger asteroid, I keep in mind that I'm going to have to get a little closer in order to mine it, and keep an eye on the distance to target info. Imagine having to not only calculate the distance between each object in game every second, but the distances between every surface of every object each second, and I think it's easy to see why the former would save some time.

In the case of collision meshes, you are correct that it would be incredibly important to know where the outer bounds of an object were, and this is the case, as you will see once you get into PvP.

Well, they don't have to do all of the calculations serverside, and they don't have to compute it for each object either. The distance numbers that the client displays could be computed on the client, first of all. Secondly, they should only be calculated for the single targeted object. The only time the server would need to get involved is when the player tries to scan or mine the asteroid, at which point it would need to do the computations for that single ship-roid pair to make sure the client isn't cheating.

The ship itself could continue being treated as a point during these computations, at least when it comes to standard ships. Capital ships, being so large, would need to have the computations be based on the location of the weapon port in question, rather than their center. Alternately, make longer-range beams and scanners available to the capships, which should probably be done anyway.