While re-vamping the start new game/start tutorial system I thought that the first “flight basics” tutorial shouldn’t include an asteroid base – to cut down on complexity and laser focus on the tutorial objectives. But a barren map wouldn’t be appropriate either, so enter asteroids. I’ve been meaning to add these since forever, but finally got the motivation to do it. There are a few different types – ones that move and ones that don’t – the movers move depending if your ship has enough mass to move them when there’s a collision.

The future of these objects yields some neat possibilities – shoot larger rocks to make smaller rocks. Particle effects around bigger ones – dust clouds, smaller rocks, hollow asteroids and quite a lot other neat potentials.

Via the battle editor duplicate button I can quickly generate some fairly “OK” fields, the battle editor automatically randomizes the rotation of the few rock models that I have so far, so that they don’t appear completely alike. Even at this very basic state of asteroid field generation they add a lot to the emptiness of space. Now to teach the AI to avoid them…

In other news, there are now 3 new ship models, 1 new station model, about 5 asteroid models, a few new turret models, new torpedo models and another station mostly done. So content wise we are heading in a good direction as well.