Asteroid Rings

[Fyron]

That is exactly what I do not want to do. Too many game balance issues. SE5 has the capability to accomplish the visual effect without so much disruption.

[Baron Munchausen]

Well, it would be rather cool to have a large continuous ring of asteroids that slowly rotates like a ringworld. But this would be a pain to manage from the aspect of other game mechanics like remote mining.

[Suicide Junkie]

Considering the size of the asteroids, sprites really aren't that bad...

Given an angular, animated sprite which shows the asteroid rolling its chunky faces around, you wouldn't even notice unless you looked really close and spun the camera around at the same time.

[Fyron]

Another possibility besides having 1 object for the whole field is to break it up into parts, such as 6 separate fields. Each would represent one sixth of the complete ring. They could use the same base model(s), but rotated to the appropriate angle. This would allow multiple ships to mine the ring, as well as multiple planets to be constructed, without going overboard like in FQM SE4.

BM:
The actual object would always be located at the same place, such as the "top" of the ring (according to hex coordinates). There would probably be some sort of super-asteroid or other marker to indicate this position. The model/animation would then be offset to appear centralized in the system.

SJ:
Are you volunteering?