If big energy emitting ships can be invisible behind roids, shouldnt cargo boxes?

+1

[stamp of approval]™

+1

This'll make mining fun.

Nothing makes mining fun. This'll make AFK mining safer, which I'm against but... it is logical and I'm all for logic.

Mining is great fun for killing time while your reading.

It also makes it much harder to find a far away roid that you've been mining from.

Heh, so actually it does balance out.

There's a performance tradeoff here. To do occlusion we cast a ray, every frame, to every ship within z range, to see if it should be included in the radar display or not. This is a big enough load that we've split it off onto a separate thread.

If we do this for all crates as well, this could more easily grow into a significant drain. Like in a situation post-convoy-death where a bunch of crates are lying around, that could slow things down. It also opens the door for people exploitatively slowing things down for people on slower machines, by laying a ton of crates.

So, my question is, is it really worth the extra load? Yes, it makes sense and all that, but ship occlusion had a dramatic potential benefit to gameplay. Crates.. well.. it could help, particularly for hiding mining activity in a dense field, but the downside may be much larger and the benefits a bit smaller (to my mind, anyway).

I welcome further feedback.

Yeah, an autojet-1-by-1 plug and a moth full of free crap would make screwing with stuff a lot of fun.

Another option... (which may not be so favorably received)... is to just not have cargo show up at all. It is a fairly realistic approach, cargo unlike ships is small and has no transponder or power source. A less hated way of doing it could be that only cargo in amounts greater than X would show up. Or possibly as it is so small, cargo could only show up within 500 meters. I don't know how these would go over but, they might be easier for the devs to implement.

What's the point of doing that though, Ryan? Why not leave it as-is if regular occlusion isn't practical?

Changing the distance, statically, would be simple. We could also make it a sector-based thing. Like an area with dense asteroids could have a lower static cargo vis distance. It's hokey, compared to the real occlusion stuff, but could be.. helpful?

The use case that concerns me, as far as keeping them visible at a distance, is that I would prefer if a miner were mining in "rough neighborhood", but a dense field, they might make use of the benefits of occlusion, or at least limited radar range, to be more secretive. Currently, if they left a bunch of cargo hanging around, that would be a road-sign for anyone passing by.

They can already hide with occlusion so long as they're not dumping tailings in the sector. This is a buggy solution in search of a problem that doesn't exist. Next.

Inc, I say go for it.

If a pirate were searching for a miner, this would just make it so they had to get closer to see the cargo widgets... (its not as though pirates don't know the locations of the good roids too)... or if a salvager were cleaning up after a skirm, they would have to do a bit more searching to find good stuff. It doesn't hurt anything and it gives us a seek to locate/seek to destroy type of situation instead of being able to jump into a sector and see cargo that 3000 meters away and behind an asteroid.

In other words... it isn't occlusion but, its good enough.

The problem is that it will make convoy kills made way out at the jump point much, much harder to track down.

Leave it well enough alone.

Sometimes change isn't always good.

If you can't do the occlusion, this has no real point to it other than encouraging afk miners. Currently, if you want to mine in a dangerous neighborhood you need to be careful about the excess cargo you jettison, and you definitely can't afk mine with an auto-jett plugin.

From a hunting perspective, I don't have a problem with thoroughly searching a dense sector if miners are consistently drawn to it, I have a problem with the current widely spread sectors with asteroid clusters way out of radar range that have nothing but a 10000m void separating them from the rest of the sector.

Edit: not to mention convoy cargo, of course... especially in large sectors like Odia B-13 where convoys like to exit the wormhole 15000m from the wormhole.

Yeah, the downsides don't really match the upsides. Fair enough. I have a titanic amount of other stuff to focus on.

let it sink? : )

heh look an iceberg! : ]