A few days ago, I was in a sector with a rather large, flattish asteroid during a Hive Skirmish and found the experience of fighting in its near vicinity rather exhilarating which got me to wondering just how big asteroids could get in the VO 'verse. Would a small moon-sized object even be possible? Deimos is the Solar System's smallest moon at 11.25 km in diameter for comparison but even an object just a few kilometers across would be interesting. Anyway, just curious.

heh , have a look at dantia L6..

We can theoretically make gigantic asteroids, but only with limited polygon counts. VO has no "terrain" type engine at present, so we cannot do automatic polygon removal based on distance within a single object. We can only apply it to an entire object. A "terrain" engine will let you have the nearby landscape in high polygonal detail, while the distant mountains are degraded to a level that's relative to what you can actually see.. but they're all basically "one object". By the same token, a gigantic asteroid using this method might have the nearby crater in high-definition, while the distant areas are heavily degraded. We do have asteroids (such as the very bumpy ones sometimes called the "bone" asteroids, Latos M7, etc) which degrade with distance from them, but only universally across the entire object. Strictly speaking, almost everything in the game decreases in detail with distance, but again, only for the whole object, not just "nearby parts".

This leaves us the option of making completely static objects. Making extremely large objects with a low polygon count can look pretty stupid, although we could do gigantic ice crystals. We could potentially dedicate an entire sector polygon count to a single object, but then it would be a.. lone gigantic asteroid, and it might still be tough to make look "good" with even a relatively high count for a single object (50,000 or so). It would look fine from a distance, but bad up close. In a true "terrain" engine the object might have millions and millions of polygons total, but you'd only see the 20,000 that were actually relevant to you.

Incarnate, thanks for the detailed reply. Not that this is a priority but perhaps a conglomeration of asteroids would work as well such as a cluster of asteroids that are laid out in a roughly spherical pattern (I've seen some smaller clusters like this). Or a really big field of asteroids laid out on a single plane. Anyway, this is mostly nostalgia on my part: flying at high speeds at low altitude used to be one of my favorite activities in my flight sim days.

If you check out:

http://www.vendetta-online.com/h/news.html

And search for the word "asteroids" (from a few months back), I think you'll see some encouraging posts. Some of this hasn't come to pass as quickly as I hoped, due to left-turns into economy changes and other reactions to need, but new sectors should be appearing this month.

Found it and eagerly looking forward to it all.

"Now, however, I want to change a few things. I want to add some new ores and minerals, rarer and more sporadic than before, reworking our build trees for upcoming Manufacturing (crafting). "I want to increase the number of asteroids and the sheer.. graphical interest of sectors. I want combat that involves actually flying through densely packed asteroid fields, sometimes with the lowered visibility from fogging byproducts of Xithricite mining, but perhaps also leaving visual cues to recent ship passage in the foggy clouds. Tense combat of hunter and hunted in regions of limited sensor scope, or stealthy negotiation of enemy territory when surrounded by opponents.. only a stones throw away. I see these things as forums for pirates, espionage, even miners looking for a lucrative load of ore from a dangerous or illegal area of space."

Indeed, take a look at the Latos M7 sector I mentioned earlier. That is a very old sector, but can be considered a taste of what's coming.