Asteroid fields and the editor

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Asteroid fields and the editor

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ual002
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Post by ual002 » Wed Jul 01, 2020 3:52 pm

Watching a lot of rebels recently and its been giving me inspiration for some missions.

Firstly, I'm wondering if there is anyone who has a best practice for the creation of dense asteroid fields, as the ones in the vanilla game seem a bit sparse. I can copy the ones from missions in the vanilla game but I wonder if we actually fully understand how the fields populate number and position of asteroids.

Secondly, using the same tech, I wonder if we could somehow also create debris fields if we had opts for high fidelity starship debris in varying sizes.
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Q
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Post by Q » Fri Jul 03, 2020 7:55 pm

I’ve always disliked the very open and sparsely populated asteroid fields too. One possibility I thought of was to group a cluster of objects into a single .opt. So instead of each debris/asteroid being a single model you can get more dense clusters of objects. The problem then arises where the object cluster is then treated as a single large object.
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the_stag
Rebel Alliance
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Post by the_stag » Sat Jul 04, 2020 12:53 am

Q wrote:
Fri Jul 03, 2020 7:55 pm
The problem then arises where the object cluster is then treated as a single large object.
That shouldn't be too difficult. We already have space stations that are help together by thin portions of structure. It seems possible to "connect" the asteroids with an non-collision and clear piece of very thin structure (turn the texture inside out). Sure, sections of the asteroid field will move in unison, but when you have enough of them all moving together it might not be noticeable.

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ual002
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Post by ual002 » Sat Jul 04, 2020 2:03 am

The only problem I've encountered so far is that the asteroids appear to have different flight group colors to simulate different types/colors of rock. You can see this using an opt viewer, however if in allied you change the flight group color it does not appear to change the flight group color as expected in mission. I would suggest taking advantage of using a different model for later flight group colors for starship debris that is of similar size to the asteroids so it can share its same hitbox, however we would need to solve the problem of changing the flight group color first.

Alternatively, the opt replacer is a perfect solution given you don't have a mission with both an asteroid field and debris field at the same time.
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