Just had an idea while watching the old kickstarter video...what if... instead of rendering asteroids as planets (in the system)... we just render them as particles until someone lands on them and begins to colonize, when they would turn back into planets *radius under 50*?? It would help make this a reality without tons of optimization patches.
Actually, it would need to be a particle when no one is looking at it- it would render as a planet when someone was looking at it- to show metal. The way programming works, its absolutely possible to make it render on one person's game and not another's. But the transition from particle to planet would be a lot more complicated than you think. That would cause an insane bit of lag, whenever moving back in forth between the asteroid and the other planets.
I think the funky way the game plays on radius 50 objects is a more serious issue than having asteroids to begin with. If they're truly radius 50... A. You couldn't fit a halley on them. Could you? B. I doubt that ten of them would be as demanding as a single radius 200 planet.
Currently Halleys are Halley V. Maybe for asteroid you could have a smaller Halley IV ? Also I think asteroid belts should be largely cosmetic with 2 to 3 launchable size 75 roids.
we could have pre-created asteroid shaped particles that have similar layers as planets close to them for buildings, units and orbital the difference between a planet and asteroid with this method is that the planet is randomly generated at the start of each match where as the asteroid particle was created by devs or modders prior to the start of the match and stays the same every time said particle is generated in system so the asset is loaded only once and used multiple times so if you want to draw a majora's mask moon face on an asteroid particle you could do that with a particle texture creator and every asteroid the is generated would have a face textured on the particle(the picture of the majora's mask moon face is below) because the asteroid particle is a stock particle like explosions the simulator should not have to re-render the asteroid every time an asteroid is generated in system it becomes like cutting and pasting the same asteroid every time basically
