More details on upcoming Asteroids update!

Oh don't get me wrong, I'm all for the awesome!!

I love that this is still worked on, but reverting does not sound fun to me.

1. craters balance things, so blindly throwing a planet without intel on the commander location is too risky
2. recolonizing after impact is awesome
3. craters are the only form of deformable terrain
4. if the asteroids respawn you can slowly spam asteroids until all of the planets are gone
5. I know we are playing fast and loose with physics, but a tiny rock making a whole planet disappear is going to silly

Except that craters never got fully implemented in the first place. The "new" planet model with the crater added was only ever created on the client as far as I'm aware, the server is only placing an obstacle in the location of the crater instead. The nav mesh is never being updated, and neither are any other components which could be affected by a changed planet geometry.

I don't even think that dynamic map updates (not just adding obstacles or slicing maps in half such as in the HR trailer, but actually modifying the navigation mesh to create new paths inside formerly solid areas) were ever intended to be supported by the engine.

So the step back is not exactly unexpected. Too bad, that this also means that all the work which was already put into craters is now in vain.

Even though, I wonder why nav mesh updates aren't possible? I get that they were a difficult thing back when the nash mesh actually consisted of a bunch of 2D plains seamed together. But ever since that thing is actually a 3D structure in a voxel space, it should have been possible if not even trivial.

I believe mistakes have been made in the design, respectively in the usage of the CSG system. Hard baking the planets geometry as a single, full detail 3D model wasn't exactly a smart idea to use in real time graphics. The use of a much simplified planet geometry, extended by the use of tessellation, vertex displacement maps and (large!) instanced additive decals (plus the tiny decals we already have right now, even though specifically not "stored" but distributed "randomly" at runtime by shader magic), plus more maps to simulate terrain impact on the server, would have kept the complexity down to a level where live geometry patching and the regeneration of dependent structures rather than full geometry swaps would actually have been possible.


So, will Asteroids be fun to play with, implemented in the way pictured? Unlikely, they are not much different from the current mechanics. Usually, you have no reason to go Halley more than once a match either way, that is if you go that path at all and you don't just resort with the superior Annihilaser option or just plain unit spam. Making Halley use a binary option (total planet destruction) pushes it even further towards the role of the Annihilaser, and even further away from usage in mid game scenarios.

By the current vision, you could as well go cheap and just show a prerendered cutscene when an Asteroid finally impacts, as in 9/10 cases it's going to be the end of the match anyway.

Many of the more fun ideas which would have actually changed the gameplay on Asteroids, making it an actually different game mode (such as Asteroid belts with micro gravity for ballistics and eased Asteroid hopping inside a single sphere of influence) haven been discarded anyway.

So what are we probably to expect next, based on the current approach? My guess would be, that Nukes are being granted the power to destroy Asteroids in a fixed number of hits, as cheap respawnable game enders turn out to be cheesier than originally intended.

1) I would like to voice against the planet smashing destroying the whole planet (planet vers planet ok but not moon vers planet)
2) would the asteroids destroy the whole planet 2??

yes, asteroids under the proposed system would destroy the whole planet. This proposal doesn't seem very popular so be sure you give your feedback here and/or in the poll so Uber can get an early feel for the communities desire.

I like the idea that nukes can destroy asteroids.

I think one thing is obvious... The implementation of asteroids could add some very interesting gameplay mechanics. And front what people are discussing, asteroids can definitely be made to play quite differently from the current small moon planetoids.

My wish list is here: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/my-wish-list-for-asteroids-and-planet-smashes.69148/

I am not suggesting to really upadte the planet geometry. It is okay to have it all be fake, since the intend is to block the area completely anyway. So if the craters are not ridiculously big (half planet or the like) it's totally fine to have a client side "crater"-look and a server side "this area is filled by a giant sphere that blocks all movements".
That's pretty much what they have already, blocking an area from all movements is something that buildings usually do as well, so the nav system supports that.
The question is more: Can it be made to look a little better with some additional crater graphical effects? That's mainly a question of spawning some fancy looking features or particle effects at the right location.

Well now that shouldn't be to hard.
You can even cover up the corner cases of an asteroid hitting a body of water by placing a rock formation (cooled magma) around the impact crater, and filling lava inside.
Voila, you have an unpathable, unusable area which can look cool in a relatively easy way.

Totally in with the nuking asteroids idea, it falls within the design parameters of 'Awesome'.

How about this:

• Planet smashing into planet: Total destruction of both planets
• Asteroid smashing into asteroid: Total destruction of both asteroids
• Asteroid smashing into planet: Everything on planet is wiped out with fancy effect and planet is replaced with some kind of lava planet (so you can rebuild stuff on some parts of it)

That is what I want.

What almost everybody in the community seems to want

Awesome! Sorry that I haven't played for months, been so busy with rounding up my last year of high school! But I've been checking and reading the forums daily!

Now it's vacation, I should soon return to this game!

wasn't the point of asteroids to be unstopable once they are on the move and to close to a planet ... nukes destroying asteroids entirely defeats that .. so i disagree ..
would also just be another nuke vs antinuke situation ...

Instead of the nuke destroying the asteroid completely how about it break it into smaller pieces like a cluster effect? as it did in the original Kickstarter trailer. But I'm guessing it be way to tech heavy VFX for the engine to handle. But would look awesome

would be merely a cosmetic difference to the same problem ... a nuke being able to bust an asteroid be it moving or not makes nukes too strong and asteroids not a viable option ... in that case you may just continue standart nuke vs antinukeplay ...

I think that it could be neat if nuking the asteroid will reduce it's damage area, but that's if they go by the "asteroid does bigger than nuke but not full planet destruction" model.

That's the current damage model. The larger the rock, the bigger it hurts. Unfortunately, a planet is basically a slightly bigger nuke in most fights right now. People like to add in small moons to add the option, but planet on planet action is not going to happen unless the system is designed for it.

That said, I'm not so sure going from one extreme to the other is a good thing. It's an interesting choice - and I'd love to see how it pays off in the future.

On asteroids and metal: They need some metal. Otherwise they really aren't that useful - expanding there would be costly in the short term and probably not the best choice. I've seen that in many different maps with a metal-less metal planet or moon. No one wants to go there because there are better ways to spend the metal.

Sooo that's the nail on the coffin for the destructible environement then? beside burning trees and entirely vaportized planets, I can say goodbye to hoping to fight on half ruined world covered in small and big craters, or lush planets turned into hellscapes by the insanity of the battles? That's sad.

I always looked forward to fighting on a planet so badly damaged it looked like an apple core, and for Years, since Beta, I though planetary annihilation was gonnato pull it off. I guess after the asteroid update it's as good as it's gonna go. No destructible environement, popcorn units, no various skirmish mods (assasination, annihilation, etc) no AI flavours, pointless reclaim, and a sad galactic war... I don't expect a PA 2.0 or 3.0, as funds are not infinite. Still thanks for the ride. I'm gonna turn my attention to Ashes of the Singularity and see how that go, but won't be a founder, I learned my lesson.