🚀 go-pugleaf

Ross Ridge <rridge@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> looked up from reading the
entrails of the porn spammer to utter  "The Augury is good, the signs
say:

>Ross Ridge <rridge@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> looked up from reading the
>>It was implicit, if you don't have them colliding then you don't need
>>modern CPUs or GPUs to model them.  A Commodore 64 could do it.
>
>Xocyll  <Xocyll@kingston.net> wrote:
>>A lot of distinct, detailed asteroids you can land on - each one of
>>which would be modeled and require a hefty GPU to do so.
>>It's not just a round rock.
>
>In the original Starflight (which was ported to the Commodore 64) you
>could land of lots of distinct planets.  

Yeah and those planets were full 3d representations that you actually
entered the atmosphere of, getting lower and lower while the details got
higher and higher?  Why am I thinking not?

>It doesn't take a lot of CPU or
>GPU to implement this, it just takes more power to make it look prettier.
>More detailed asteroids are just chrome, not any sort of new gameplay.
>If Chris Roberts wanted to implement landing on asteroids and setting
>up mines he could've done so in the original Privateer.  It would've
>looked bad but everything you described in terms of gameplay could've
>been done back then.  The 1994 game Alien Legacy did almost everything
>you described, you could land of distinct asteroids, each rendered
>differently, and set up mines on them, just not from a space-sim
>perspective.
>
>In my original post I said that I couldn't think of any reason why
>you would need better CPUs or GPUs to implement new sorts of gameplay,
>nothing that you couldn't have done ten years ago, you'd only need it
>to implement better graphics.  You presented your idea for improving on
>asteroids in that context as if it were a counter example.  As a gameplay
>idea what you've described could've implemented on PCs more than 20
>years ago.  If all you really want here is better asteroid rendering,
>then modern technology can make a difference, but I'm suprised if this
>minor graphical detail is what you consider so important.

For an accurate representation of an asteroid, you would need a heft
GPU.
Hell just what we've seen on the moon shows that - it's not just a nice
smooth ball, you've got lots of jagged edges (and there would be more
once you started blasting.

Using a planet as a counter example is silly since it's just represented
as a sphere with a texture on it or it's just a 2d sprite and appears
the same regardless of direction (depending on the game.)

Whereas doing an asteroid you can land on, (and presumably it would have
to be large enough for you to land on while at the same time be small
enough for whatever mineral scanner the ship has to be able to scan the
whole thing,) requires a full, 3 dimensional, detailed representation.

You're going to have to find a spot you can land on, or make one with
your ships weapons.

More like a capital ship with superstructure you can fly into, as
opposed to the ball in space or 2d sprite in space.

>>Most Games' asteroid belts (or fields) are made up of nothing but the
>>exact same rock (or 2 or 3 different rocks) randomly placed over and
>>over again as obstacles you can run into.  
>>
>>They often cannot be damaged, and in the few cases where you can damage
>>them, when you come back to the area, they're all back again since they
>>aren't tracked.
>
>Since you've never seen an asteroid in another solar system then by your
>own arugment you cannot say that any of this is unrealistic.  You don't
>*know* that asteroids don't all look alike or don't suddenly reapear
>when you're not looking.

Well since it's hypothesized that they're the result of the breakup of
larger objects (moons and planets) and we know how things look when we
blow them up, that's not much of a stretch.
We can assume they'd be similar.  We can't assume that every system will
behave exactly like ours does, since we know there are multi-star
systems out there.

The day they find asteroids that vanish and reappear is they day I'll
believe we're all part of a console game since that's

>Even asteroids in original Wing Commander could be a realistic depiction
>if the laws of physics can change so that everything looks pixelated.

Silly but true.
It's a big universe (in theory*) and we just don't know that the same
rules that apply here apply everywhere.

* In theory, since science fiction has described this kind of thing before.
Philip Jose Farmer's World of Tiers Series, where the advanced race
create pocket universes and it turns out that Earth was so created and
our universe ends at 3AU, the rest of the universe is just a simulation.

They didn't do it to be cruel (as ascribed to them by the main
protagonist), it was their first creation and an exact duplicate of
their own system - which had been created by some other race and had the
same limitations -which is how they found out it was possible to do it
in the first place.

Or read some Vernor Vinge for scifi where the universe is made up of
various layers and zones where different things are possible and where
the speed of light is variable depending on what zones you're in.

So much of yesterday's science fiction has become science fact, so many
beliefs about how the world worked have been disproved, why assume that
what we consider the "Laws" of physics are universal laws and not a
local set of rules?

>Like I said, this discussion is pointless.  If you're going to define
>what's realistic is based on what you imagine to be real and not based on
>what we know to be real then anything anyone imagines can be considered
>equally realistic.  Asteroids could actually be the droppings of space
>unicorns and mined for rare and precious rainbow-coloured gummi bears.
>At least that wouldn't require changing the laws of physics.

Yeah it would, the inverse square law - not to mention an organic
creature that craps irregularly shaped rocks in space.  Those are some
heavy duty intestines it has.
What does it feed on to leave behind asteroids of rainbow coloured gummi
bears?

I don't think the buying public would be too interested in a space-sim
type game with unicorns and gummi-bear asteroids though.
Since you bring it up I'll assume you would be.

But how nice to see you're going to just declare it pointless and never
actually answer the question of what the hell were you thinking when you
went off on this ultra dense asteroid field business and ascribed that
as my wants when it's the exact opposite.

Xocyll
-- 
I don't particularly want you to FOAD, myself. You'll be more of 
a cautionary example if you'll FO And Get Chronically, Incurably, 
Painfully, Progressively, Expensively, Debilitatingly Ill. So 
FOAGCIPPEDI. -- Mike Andrews responding to an idiot in asr