I reccomend making the asteroid belts a little to a lot denser so they become actually difficult to pilot. That way when you get in a fight in an asteroid belt there is more than just the other pilot to worry about. Also upgrading the ship speed would help this in general so when you slam into asteroids it will actually hurt. As of now getting into a fight in the asteroid belts is just like getting into a fight in open space. You can't use them to cover you nor can you race through them to avoid a fight or at least around them to get the drop on your enemy. It would be nice to see asteroid belts that were seriously difficult to pilot at speed.

You can use asteroids as cover in a fight (I have done plenty of times), and I've also crashed into asteroids whilst fighting next to them. Making them any denser would also make the field smaller, since I'm guessing the number of asteroids in a sector is currently optimised to be a suitable number of objects for performance reasons.

Try finding some of the big fractured asteroids, or those with holes in, if you want lots of chunks close together.

Anyway, they're already much thicker than they should be: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main.TheAsteroidThicket

Sam.

Asteroid belts can't be too densely packed for rendering speed reasons. I'm always on the lookout for ideas on how to quickly render infinite asteroid regions, though.

What if you kept the same number of asteroids... but set them orbiting a station or central large asteroid at high speed? That might provide the kind of difficult to pilot area cconfo was talking about, but keep the asteroids to a limited number.

moving asteroids == lag, and lots of it.

i think later on in a year or so the devs could make the asteroid fields alot larger and less random sorta like what there is in the Sol II noobie region but much larger

why in a year its because in a year powerful graphic cards will be cheap

Is there some other sort of obstacle that could provide for difficult navigation? Maybe some sort of "ion hail" in the form of plasma cannon blasts could randomly fade in and out throughout the sector, if that would be any easier to render.

OMG ray, I just thought of something for getting a lot more asteroids in a sector.

Probably wouldn't work (I have no inner dev) but it's a good idea, I think.

Couldn't you just make a basic pattern for each sector (minus the stations of course, don't want a roid blocking a dock) and set it to repeat a hundred trillion times? I think it would probably make lag happen less than with a hundred billion trillion different custom-placed asteroids.

An issue with that would be repeating ore patterns. You could, however (I think, again, I have no inner dev), make a different repeating pattern for ores and put in different ores depending on where the asteroids are on the ore pattern.

It probably wouldn't work though, I have no clue how that stuff works.

-Panis Onar, Panis as UIT, and Oh Dear