What i think should be done to improve Asteroids.

[daniel l.]

You know how in the game Rodina, Asteroids are allocated realistically to a belt around the sun (Where else would they go?) Currently the one's in ksp are always NKO's Every single asteroid wants a piece of kerbin,

Now i understand the issues of having thousands of asteroids, And the fix for this is to not show them on the map screen, And not to even render them until within 20-60km range, Asteroids should also have more sizes ranging from class A all the way up to giants of 500m radius, Squad should also incorporate voxel terrain to the asteroid's making them modifiable ingame (So if you crash into one you leave a crater,) As for finding them, Distant asteroid's should simply show up as they do in Rodina, As little blips that mark their location without interrupting gameplay or causing much lag.

Most of these asteroids would share very similar orbits, So the DeltaV required to fly from asteroid to a nearby one would not be that much, Maybe even just a matter of pointing at it and firing.

The large 500m asteroids that i pointed out earlier, Would frequently be in the way of the smaller one's, Making impacts frequent in the asteroid belt, This belt would not be like in Sci-fi's where they are EVERYWHERE!! but still they would be close enough to from one to another without use of too much fuel, This would also add extra challenge in getting to the outer planets because while it's unlikely you will it an asteroid on the way to jool, You hair might turn grey with a few close calls.

EDIT: To fix the problem of rendering multiple orbits at once, All asteroids would be paired to the nearest large asteroid (Meaning that they are viewed by the computer as one craft and each smaller asteroid is a part.) And maybe even generate a form of dust fog that you can find in asteroid clusters

Edited March 12, 2015 by daniel l.
Improved upon the article

[Bill Phil]

They're supposed to be NKOs. The belt's roids would be quite a bit bigger.

[daniel l.]

They're supposed to be NKOs. The belt's roids would be quite a bit bigger.

Actually the real asteroid belt is primarily dominated by small asteroids (Class A or smaller) so having a belt composed primarily of small rocks with the occasional big one is realistic.

[vexx32]

Moved to Suggestions.

There's one major flaw with this idea. Even if they aren't shown in the tracking station, the game still needs to keep track of their orbits... which is going to cause significant lag, no matter what you do.

[nAssailant]

All of the asteroids in KSP are meant to be NKO. They were added as a part of the NASA Asteroid Redirect Mission pack, which is based on NASA's real inititave to capture an asteroid passing nearby Earth and place it into Earth orbit for study.

Adding in an asteroid field would be something completely different, and the other things you propose would take up man-hours (that Squad has invested in other things), and precious memory and processor use in-game.

Don't get me wrong, those things would be neat, and they're interesting ideas, but I don't foresee any chance of this happening.

[daniel l.]

Moved to Suggestions.

There's one major flaw with this idea. Even if they aren't shown in the tracking station, the game still needs to keep track of their orbits... which is going to cause significant lag, no matter what you do.

The game would only have to keep track of the larger one's that can be discovered from the Tracking station, And the one's nearest to any craft you have in the asteroid belt.

All the asteroid's that are too small too discover from the tracking station (Less then 150m, in the asteroid belt it would be hard to find even E class among all the others.) and are not in the vicinity of any spacecraft would despawn.

[vexx32]

... every object in the game that has an orbit of any kind has to be kept track of. You could generate random ones in general proximity of craft in a certain region, but it wouldn't be any kind of actual asteroid belt.

[nAssailant]

The game would only have to keep track of the larger one's that can be discovered from the Tracking station, And the one's nearest to any craft you have in the asteroid belt.

Thats the thing, for the smaller ones to be rendered, they would have to exist in the game's memory before you even got to them. Populating the space near your craft with new asteroids with entirely new orbits would also be processor/memory intensive, depending on how many there are/how close they need to be to you to be created.

Then what? When you leave the belt, do those small asteroids you detected disappear, or do they remain? If they stay, your system's memory would quickly become full. If they disappear, then what is the point?

... every object in the game that has an orbit of any kind has to be kept track of. You could generate random ones in general proximity of craft in a certain region, but it wouldn't be any kind of actual asteroid belt.

Exactly.

[Greenfire32]

Currently the one's in ksp are always NKO's Every single asteroid wants a piece of kerbin

I like to view this as the game's way of saying "Kerbals have 'this' much technology. They know there are other rocks out there, but here's the ones they can find."

Now i understand the issues of having thousands of asteroids, And the fix for this is to not show them on the map screen, And not to even render them until within 20-60km range

The problem with this is that even though they wouldn't be rendered, they'd still have to be plotted and kept track of by the game. Especially if they're going to have course-correcting events such as collisions with other asteroids.

It's a good idea, but it's also just not yet feasible. At least in my opinion.

Edited March 2, 2015 by Greenfire32

[daniel l.]

Thats the thing, for the smaller ones to be rendered, they would have to exist in the game's memory before you even got to them. Populating the space near your craft with new asteroids with entirely new orbits would also be processor/memory intensive, depending on how many there are/how close they need to be to you to be created.

Then what? When you leave the belt, do those small asteroids you detected disappear, or do they remain? If they stay, your system's memory would quickly become full. If they disappear, then what is the point?

Exactly.

The space in the belt would not be too dense only a mere 1 or 2 asteroids would even be detected per 150km of space traveled.

Small asteroid's dont have much in value, Even if made of expensive resources their would not be enough of it in the asteroid to justify not having it despawn, If you really wanna bookmark a asteroid you could : Dock something to it, Plant a flag (Cant be done on asteroids just yet but would probably be added with what the asteroid belt.

Only the large or nearby one's would be remembered the rest would despawn upon leaving the vicinity.

- - - Updated - - -

I like to view this as the game's way of saying "Kerbals have 'this' much technology. They know there are other rocks out there, but here's the ones they can find."The problem with this is that even though they wouldn't be rendered, they'd still have to be plotted and kept track of by the game. Especially if they're going to have course-correcting events such as collisions with other asteroids.

It's a good idea, but it's also just not yet feasible. At least in my opinion.

Even IRL we still cant see much of what happens it the asteroid belt, So the small one's would be deleted upon leaving their vicinity, So the game would only have to keep track of a couple of asteroids: The one's nearest to your ship, and the largest one's.

As for collisions they would only need to happen when you are their to see them.

[FishInferno]

what if it was the same way it was now, with random unknown objects spawning, with the option to track them. SQUAD would only need to make asteroids spawn all over the system and make a lot of them spawn in the asteroid belt area. whenever you wanted to visit one, you would just choose an unknown object from the asteroid belt and fly to it. This way, you still get the feeling of an asteroid belt, but the game only renders the ones you choose to track.

[Crzyrndm]

what if it was the same way it was now, with random unknown objects spawning, with the option to track them. SQUAD would only need to make asteroids spawn all over the system and make a lot of them spawn in the asteroid belt area. whenever you wanted to visit one, you would just choose an unknown object from the asteroid belt and fly to it. This way, you still get the feeling of an asteroid belt, but the game only renders the ones you choose to track.

It's not the rendering, it's updating their orbits consistently producing a very large processing overhead. To make a belt obviously a belt in the tracking stationg, you're going to need several hundred objects and KSP doesn't like that at all (see custom asteroids and the invasions of asteroid lice essentially breaking saves)

The only way I can see it happening is that you have to physically "find" the asteroids (randomly generated when you get inside a few 100km for larger objects, physics for smaller objects) and unless you start tracking them they just dissapear entirely upon leaving that radius. You get your belt (an area where you have a decent chance of finding asteroids) but the game doesn't grind to a halt trying to track several hundred of them, only 1-2 nearby ones and a handful you are permanently tracking.

[wasml]

Check out CustomAsteroids http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/80483 - was built for 0.25 but still works in 0.90. Adds a number of different asteroid populations and you can configure it with the cfg file (or so I'm told). This isn't quite what you outlined - just replaces the generation of all NKA's with a more varied and more challenging set of asteroids.

[Bill Phil]

Actually the real asteroid belt is primarily dominated by small asteroids (Class A or smaller) so having a belt composed primarily of small rocks with the occasional big one is realistic.

There are almost a million asteroids over 1 km in diameter in the asteroid belt...

They would dwarf the A class ones so much that the As would be practically invisible, like how they are.

[Rath]

The 20-60km load range would really be a problem because an asteroid belt is not what you see in star wars, there is over 1000km between asteroids

[Apature rocket science]

I think in carrer mode there needs to be a emergency, every 4-5 years a astroid is gona hit Kerbin and if you don't stop it you suffer a massive funding cut and you loose all your technology because the whole of Kerbin is set back to the Stone Age, and the athmosphere is 2 times thicker.

[daniel l.]

I just got another idea, What if rather than lots of small single-part asteroids how about spawning huge clusters of over 100 asteroids that are all connected by invisible part joints, This would mean that you might only need ten or 20 of these to have a acceptable asteroid belt.

[AbacusWizard]

I generally interpret the "asteroids only show up near Kerbin" phenomenon as "asteroids are everywhere, but so sparse that you're never going to encounter one unless you're specifically trying for a rendezvous; to do that, you need to know where it is, and Kerbins only have the technology to 'discover' asteroids near Kerbin."

Idea: perhaps near the expensive end of the tech tree there could be an asteroid detection device (maybe a heavier, pricier variation on the gravioli detector). In game mechanics terms, new asteroids will be spawned (aka "discovered") within a small radius of any ship with a powered detector. Perhaps the rate at which new asteroids are "discovered" could vary from place to place; there could be an asteroid belt where the spawn rate is much higher (and biased in favor of larger asteroids). This would allow players to go off in search of huge asteroids far from Kerbin, but would not require the game to constantly keep track of lots of asteroids (unless the player chooses to put detectors on dozens of ships stationed all over the place, but, well, that's the player's problem).

[KrazyKrl]

I generally interpret the "asteroids only show up near Kerbin" phenomenon as "asteroids are everywhere, but so sparse that you're never going to encounter one unless you're specifically trying for a rendezvous; to do that, you need to know where it is, and Kerbins only have the technology to 'discover' asteroids near Kerbin."

Idea: perhaps near the expensive end of the tech tree there could be an asteroid detection device (maybe a heavier, pricier variation on the gravioli detector). In game mechanics terms, new asteroids will be spawned (aka "discovered") within a small radius of any ship with a powered detector. Perhaps the rate at which new asteroids are "discovered" could vary from place to place; there could be an asteroid belt where the spawn rate is much higher (and biased in favor of larger asteroids). This would allow players to go off in search of huge asteroids far from Kerbin, but would not require the game to constantly keep track of lots of asteroids (unless the player chooses to put detectors on dozens of ships stationed all over the place, but, well, that's the player's problem).

Possibly a "Torus of influence" for the asteroid belt, in which KSP states something like "rocks be here, maybe."

Requiring an actual scan of that specific area, and time, of the asteroid belt; would be a good time to actually generate the orbital parameters of the asteroids (and to cull any intersecting asteroid orbits from the others). Now, computationally storing the asteroids becomes the difficult part.

[Yakky]

The other possibility would be to reduce each asteroid's polygon count to 1, eliminate textures, use simple 1-bit black and white graphics, and make all asteroids simple 2D outlines with sharp corners so that rendering lots of them wouldn't overly tax the system resources. That's the way they done it back in the good ol' days.