JoshParnell wrote:Scorch wrote:I understand why there is no towing of asteroids, but I had a thought: can you push asteroids with your own ship?
Of course, it would have to be a pretty massive ship depending on the size of the asteroid, but that brings another thing to mind: some sort of plowing ship?
Just spit-balling here
The real problem is allowing asteroids to move. This is a technical problem, because the cost of a movable object is muchhhh higher to the engine (the physics engine, to be precise). Asteroids are the most numerous type of object currently, and the only way that we can support a huge number of them is to have them as static geometry, which means they can't move.
If asteroids were movable, then we could allow all of the above, and I would have no problem with implementing towing. But the real problem is allowing an asteroid to move in any way...for now this is a hard restriction on the engine's capabilities
Josh... there is a way to fix this...
As you say:
The real problem is allowing asteroids to move. This is a technical problem, because the cost of a movable object is muchhhh higher to the engine (the physics engine, to be precise). Asteroids are the most numerous type of object currently, and the only way that we can support a huge number of them is to have them as static geometry, which means they can't move.
Asteroids can have rules that turn them from static to dynamic, in my programming background i've done this a lot with objects and made it so that when an object is hit by item [a,b,c] list to check if that item is on the list and then turn them dynamic with the force of impact / angle and such. Also it would be good to include the option for asteroids / objects to be dynamic or not entirely. The code isn't that hard to implement and a global function for such all / none isn't either.
I guess that'd be a great option to have tho so people with high end pc's can make a more breathing universe but ones who haven't can still enjoy the towing of asteroids with less expectation.
I CAN CODE THIS!! XD