Hard Light Productions Forums

Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The FRED Workshop => Topic started by: TopAce on April 01, 2011, 12:50:08 pm

Title: Just learned something about asteroid fields
Post by: TopAce on April 01, 2011, 12:50:08 pm

I've been led to believe that asteroids in an "active" field are hurled at ships on your escort list. This is not the whole of the story though.

So, let me give you the context. There's a mission in Syrk where you defend science vessels in an asteroid field against a hostile faction. There are two hostile cruisers and some fighters.

I observed that the science vessels fall due to the asteroids rather than the cruisers, so I thought I'd modify the asteroid field's attributes to make the mission easier. I kept replaying the mission, trying out a wide array of attribute settings, but I discovered no change in difficulty. Then I decided to take extreme measures and set the asteroid field's diameter to 300,000 meters and lowered the number of asteroids to 5 (yes, five asteroids overall).

Then I replayed and observed that the engine keeps creating asteroids around the ships on your escort list. It's not just hurling the already existing asteroids at them. This keeps up until said vessels are destroyed, irrespective of any preset values in FRED's Asteroid Editor.

Then I made a new mission with one Levy in a similarly huge and scarce field. The conclusion is the same.

I don't consider this a bug, that's why this is not in Mantis. I don't intend to complain, either. I just felt like sharing this little discovery of mine. Hope there's someone who didn't know this.  :nod:

Title: Re: Just learned something about asteroid fields
Post by: headdie on April 01, 2011, 01:12:37 pm

It's something that would be nice to control, have say spawn distance min and spawn max values that could be set in the eddtor

Title: Re: Just learned something about asteroid fields
Post by: karajorma on April 01, 2011, 08:33:46 pm

You do actually have values in the AI Profile that control how many asteroids are spawned. :)

Title: Re: Just learned something about asteroid fields
Post by: Shivan Hunter on April 01, 2011, 11:09:02 pm

Yeah, but that's not the entire issue. Hopefully though, if the asteroid code gets a revamp, that's one of the new features. As well as a max asteroid limit of 65535 ok I'll stop now

Title: Re: Just learned something about asteroid fields
Post by: Goober5000 on April 04, 2011, 01:51:00 am

Yeah, it has been known for a while that the asteroid field code needs a rewrite.  See the "how can I help" post here (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=74840.msg1479353#msg1479353).