🚀 go-pugleaf

Ross Ridge <rridge@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> looked up from reading the
>In the original Starflight (which was ported to the Commodore 64) you
>could land of lots of distinct planets.  

Xocyll  <Xocyll@kingston.net> wrote:
>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?

Yes, that's exactly what happened in the game.  Graphically it's not
all that impressive by today's standard, but back in 1986 it was really
amazing.

>For an accurate representation of an asteroid, you would need a heft
>GPU.

For an accurate graphical representation even todays computers can't
render an asteroid perfectly.  For gameplay purposes, you could do a
wireform representation with all sorts of crags, bumps and whatnot that
you could land on using computers that are over 20 years old.

>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 don't *know* that's true in every solar system.  By your own arguments
asteroid could be formed in completely different ways in other places
in the Universe.

>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.

Hold it, why do you get abritrary decide what must be same and what
can be be different?  Why does something as fundamental as the laws of
physics get to change, but not how asteroids are formed?

If I can't say your idea of asteroids is unrealistic because I can't
possibly know what asteriods are like in another solar system, then
neither can you.

>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.

No, it was an example of how ridiculous your argument is.  You haven't
actually tried to justify this asteriod idea of yours as being something
that anyone other than yourself would actually want to have in game.
You've only tried to justify it as being more realistic, and by your
own arguments space unicorns that shit out asteroids is just as realistic.

>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.

As I already explained, I incorrectly assumed that you were talking
about a gameplay idea which couldn't be implemented on PCs available ten
years ago.  I also incorrectly assumed by realistic you ment something
that resembles what we know is real rather than something that we can
only imagine exists.  You don't need a lot of computing power to draw a
single asteroid on screen, and if more than one asteroid is visible on
screen at a time then the asteroids are massively more dense than could
naturally occur in reality as we know it.

Seriously, what point do think there is in continuing to discuss whether
or not your idea of asteroids are realistic or not?  I could point out all
the factual errors you've made, try to clear up all your misunderstandings
about physics and space, but what's the point?  Everything we actually
know about the universe is compelely irrelevent because you've declared
that things could be different.  You've declared that even the laws of
physics could be different.

					Ross Ridge

-- 
 l/  //	  Ross Ridge -- The Great HTMU
[oo][oo]  rridge@csclub.uwaterloo.ca
-()-/()/  http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~rridge/ 
 db  //