A Challenge to you mod makers
 

For the older crowd of us who remember the days where the only games around were ones you had to put coins in.

When I entered the sectors in the demo where there were only asteroids....I had a flash back to the game asteroids. Monochrome with a simple triangle ship just trying to survive on a screen of rocks floating in random directions. Shoot a big one and it turns into two midsize ones ect....

Is there anyway to mod the asteroid sectors so the rocks move (slowly) and are destructible? Maybe when you shoot a rock it leaves behind a "Ore" container of varying value so "mining" can be a alternate (and risky) method of getting money? Sell the ore at a mining station. Containers might be iron, silver, gold, mithrel.
with frequency verying according to value of course.

Also there should be cargo holds that can block scanners. I.E. level 2 stelth containers can block level 1 scanners but not level 2 scanners and so on. This makes smuggeling contraband to stations and past the good guys starships possible.

Re: A Challenge to you mod makers
 

You could make the asteroids into slow moving fighters... They'd cruise along mostly in straight lines, until they need to turn to avoid a collision.
Not too bad, except that they would either turn to avoid ramming you, or come in to attack.

I'm not sure how you could cause them to split...
You could have all of them carrying fighter bays, and have the large asteroids launch smaller asteroids, which launch really small asteroids, and all would possibly drop containers of "metal"

The problems would be the launching of the babies only when its about to die, and the attack/avoid movement routines.
I suppose you could give them very low turn rates relative to their speed, but then they'd crash into each other.

Re: A Challenge to you mod makers
 

Of all things, I would have thought asteroids would be able to move in their orbits, or at least drift the way nebulae do. If anything the nebulae should be immobile like the asteroids are! Nebulae don't drift like that...

I'm missing destructible asteroids too. Some are smaller than your ship, yet even if you ram it full speed you blow up and the darn asteroid doesn't even budge. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/shock.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/tongue.gif

[ October 09, 2003, 14:56: Message edited by: Wydraz ]

Re: A Challenge to you mod makers
 

If you could adjust the AI files, you could do what SJ suggested and make them fighters. They'd show up as blue radar dots though (red when you shot them), which might or might not be a good thing. What I'd do is make a new 'race' and add some of the asteroids to it. So you have the big, immobile ones and some smaller moving ones.

As a bonus, make special components for them and they'd occasionally drop a cargo container. You could make the component useless, so the player would be forced to sell it..