moving asteroids. if they get shot, etc. when cap. ships come about, if one rams into the smallest asteroid, it would bounce off, that will not make sense, so you might as well want to change it now.

great idea! it would make more sense and be more realistic. not that they would move much, but it would still be good

Thanks for the suggestion.

If I may make one to you: Please make your subject lines meaningful. You have no idea how many threads I've read that have the same title you've chosen.

moving asteroids cause a huge problem in and of themselves however. as long as they are stationary, the server sends the info about them to the client once, then the client can take it from there. Once they are mobile and can vary in speed/direction, you have a huge increase in data transfer as the server and client now have to make sure they "agree" where the asteroids are at all times.

Also in a persistant, multiplayer universe, if the asteroids move, then eventually someone is gonna knock all of htem out into deep space, and there weont be asteroids in the sectors anymore.

Actually, both you and Spellcast are right.

Sometime you are bored fly about 50km out into a sector. Turn around and look at the 'roid field. You'll quickly realize just how tiny a portion of the sector most of the objects occupy. If they were allowed to roam, pretty soon the nearest asteroids would be like 100km from each other and anywhere.

But, you are also right that the current collision with asteroid makes alot more sense when its the impact of a 3 ton, 10 meter long fighter, than it will with a 770 meter long 1.3 million ton battle cruiser which is as big or bigger than the 'roid.

This would seem to be an insolvable problem, but its not really. All you have to do is assume that asteroids have a home location that they prefer to live in (maybe they are all floating at lagrange points) and if pushed out of thier home location they will slowly drift back and settle down in it. So long as the do it slowly enough, it won't offend anyone's sense of realism to see it happening. And as long as asteroids are hard to move, players won't be able to really mess things up too badly. Presumably thier can be some sort of cutoff point, below which a ship hitting an asteroid imparts no momentum, and above which it is treated like a collision with a mobile object. Or maybe we can just make them so heavy that effectively only the largest ships can bump them more than a meter or so anyway.

I also think that it would be cool if more of the 'roids rotated. I would assume that any kind of constant motion doesn't absolutely need to be updated by the server. As long as the server gives the client an initial position and a constant vector of motion, both the server and the client will perfectly agree on the objects position for a very long time. Lateral motion might be out for the reasons Spellcast outlined, but rotations aren't.

Likewise, I think it would be cool if code existed for rotations about a point outside of an object. In this way, asteroids could be made to drift by revolving about a point.

I had been thinking of this roid movement thing too...

I really hope it turns out that something can be worked out to make movement possible...

I'd really like to see the entire bunch of objects slowly rotating around a point... (station too...) Would be much fun, but I understand the network traffic thing, so... prolly won't happen... :-(

Anyway, I like the idea of 'roid home locations, and drift back...

And I'd like to see more roid rotation, but the mining kinks need to be worked out first... Those mining beams are currently behaving strangely sometimes on rotating roids.

Also, if roid movement is implimented, I think there should be a mining ship add-on that could be engaged to automatically match your ships movement to the 'roids movement. Kinda tractor beamish, but doesn't bring it closer, just maintains current distance...

/me gives 2c

"And I'd like to see more roid rotation, but the mining kinks need to be worked out first... Those mining beams are currently behaving strangely sometimes on rotating roids."

I've reported this problem too. (You do report bugs, right?)

"Also, if roid movement is implimented, I think there should be a mining ship add-on that could be engaged to automatically match your ships movement to the 'roids movement. Kinda tractor beamish, but doesn't bring it closer, just maintains current distance..."

I disagree. And while I'm at it, let me say that I disagree with this whole class of suggestions. I do not think that there is any particular need to focus on 'improvements' to the game that essentially allow the client to play the game for you. I don't want the devs to waste even a second of time creating autopilots, tools for buying bots to play the game for you, or anything else until all the wonderful things that we could put in the game for the actual players to do are done. It may be entirely realistic that spacecraft are computer controlled, and require only minimal human supervision - BUT I DON'T WANT MY GAME TO BE LIKE THAT. I want to be in control. Not the machine I'm typing on.

also keep in mind how in space there is something called gravity, as small as it may be at some points. although, that would also cause traffic.

For all practical purposes, we can ignore the effect of gravity on all the objects currently in the game.

A typical 1km asteroid in the game probably masses something like 416 million tons. But, it would only be exherting about 1 N of force on one of our ships parked on its surface, and much less than that on a ship flying 1 km away.

The typical engine of a ship in the game is producing about 210N of force at present, so the effect of gravity is not worth computing.

Realistic gravity would also seriously disrupt the layout any of the asteroid fields that we have, because however weak the gravity fields of those rocks might be, since they aren't moving relative to each other sooner or latter they'd all end up in a big clump. It's just one of those things where realism seriously constrains artistic vision more than I think is acceptable.

If we got up into the range of 20km rocks or something, then gravity might be worth computing but even then to keep the calculations simple I'd strong suggest a simplified version in which you had a couple concentric spheres of small constant gravitational force around a larger 'roid and ignore the realism of exact calculations in favor of something like believable drift and drag.

Really funny things start happening with something like 300km rocks, but there is no need to go there because there will almost certainly never be a 300km object in the game.

UPDATE: I just realized that I was assuming that all asteroids were made of rock of some sort. If we start playing with the content of the 'roids, we can do all sorts of funny things. Solid iron has a density about 3 times that of rock. Solid Osmium has a density about 9 times that of rock. A 5km 100% iron asteroid would exhert a force of about 15N or a small ship on the surface. (It would also contain more iron than has been mined from the Earth in the entire history of mankind.) A 5km 100% osmium asteroid would exhert a force of about 45N on a small ship on its surface! (On the other hand, that's probably more osmium than exists in the entire mass of the Earth.)