Saturns Moons

Well I have had some success making asteroids, texturing them and getting them in game. Here are some shots of a fully functioning 20km long asteroid. I think I will make about a dozen of these, now that I know how, for placement around the middle states.

Have you encountered a problem with LOD's?

I sized up the stock asteroids to get an idea of how large I could go and found that the larger size makes them blink into existance well within the player's field of veiw.

While the model is much larger, the program places the asteroids at the same distance from the player when creating them. Thus, you get the blinking effect. It's a bit difficult to describe... I can send you the mod if you wish.

(Note that this only applies to asteroid fields and not geog controlled asteroid objects.)

[Edit] A pic to show the larger asteroids. Rather scary to pilot through in a Storm Petrel.

However, would it be feasible to place asteroids with the geog tools?

It depends on what you are trying to do. The geog tool places stations (or moons and planets). Anything can be a station. Even one of your asteroids. (And PS did create an empty asteroid as a station).

But if you want to decorate the area around a station, then I suggest using the station env code, because it does not add to the number of stations that must be processed while doing code searches etc.

On the other hand, feel free to add a few modules to those asteroids and call them stations. I always thought the current asteroid stations were too much station, too little asteroid for my taste.

Consider texturing some of those asteroids with icy/snow textures (or just make an alternate set) that could be used for comet fragments and things in the outer belts.

If we end up implementing the mining game features, prospectable asteroids will need to be added. These could work really well.

I noticed that effect too Shane, when i was tinkering with the asteroid fields a while back. Not sure what we can do about it if it is the clipping distance. Or maybe you are seeing LOD switching when missized models? I think I will quickly whip up an asteroid field sim made of my new uber asteroids and see how it looks and acts.

The asteroid I made above blinks into existance because of the clipping limitations, but it still looks good. It would be nice if we could somehow create a new class of objects that were not culled.

Grandpatrout, i was thinking that we could use the set of asteroids I will make for both station environments, and for placement via geog. Select a few of the big ones for geog placements and the smaller ones for station enviroments. Making icy textures will be easy. I plan to make textures that are a lot less brown and more like the textures seen on the Cassini website. As for adding making one into an asteroid station...that might push my knowledge of lightwave to the max..but we will see.

Here is a sneak peak at my new asteroids' skins. I have about 6 types, not all show here. They look quite good when flying around close to them.

Cambragol, those are beautiful. Very nice.