Where are they??

I've long suspected something was up but never bothered investigating it til now. I have a 20" LCD and have always been bothered by the lack of asteroids. I would usually wave it away thinking "4 asteroids spread over 20" of screen real estate - it wouldn't be hard to miss them". Call me blind but I've only noticed now that actually some types of asteroids aren't there at all. However, if I turn my screen down to 1344x840 or lower then they all appear fine. It's only when I run at max res (1680x1050) that they disappear.

This post has been edited by Guy : 23 September 2005 - 05:14 PM

I've noticed a tendancy in that regard, it seems that there are 4 asteroids per x area, where the area includes a fair margin around the edge of the screen (Mostly noted while playing with the asteroid miner AI). With a gigantic screen, this margin is even larger, exponentially decreasing asteroid density. I think the asteroid legacy code should have been thrown out for Nova, but I'm not the one that would have to put the time in to fix it. But yeah, they are most likely there, somewhere.

Or do you mean specifically you never see any giant metal asteroids, for example? I really don't know the system by system appearences. This would be better tested with a plugin.

A little testing...

Small and medium asteroids of all types never appear in 1680x1050. Switching down to 1344x840 makes the medium ones appear but the small ones are still missing. Only when I switch down to 1024x768 do they all appear fine.

Hmm... it seems like its a trick of probablility. Ill have to test this myself now, though. The larger the screen, 1) the longer each asteroid stays on the screen and 2) the larger the chance that you don't notice asteroid X. On the smaller screens, asteroids zip past and thus recycle quickly, so it takes a much shorter time to replace all of the asteroids some number of times. This bug just sounds so strange, though. I can't imagine why it would behave as such.

I hardly think I'm the only one with a screen larger than 1024x768. Can't anyone else test this?

This happens to me as well on my 20" Cinema Display.

gazza_2001, on Oct 4 2005, 11:57 PM, said:

This happens to me as well on my 20" Cinema Display.
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You people and your giant cinema displays! I'm not jealous, I swear!

This does sound odd. Try things with no plug-ins and see if it's not some odd plug-related error. However, other than that, I have no idea what this could be, or how to fix it.

Maybe Matt figured that with such a huge resolution you wouldn't see them anyhow, and progressively removes them as the screen gets bigger.

gazza_2001, on Oct 5 2005, 04:57 AM, said:

This happens to me as well on my 20" Cinema Display.
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Whew, so I'm not just going crazy. I think it has something to do with the actual size of the sprite.

There's certainly something in the engine that keeps track of all objects in a system- roids, spobs, whathaveyou- not only the visible ones but the invisible ones. This can be made evident by watching a roid go offscreen and then following it out- I don't think that it dissapears; I'm pretty sure that the same one can be found again through searching. Perhaps when there is a large ammount of screen real estate versus whatever buffer sise the engine uses to keep track of this stuff it overloads? I don't notice any problems at 1152*870...

Hmm... if you let a roid go a few pixels offscreen, it's still there. Too far, and the engine forgets about it.

Maybe your screen is too big, and it won't spawn because you see where they would spawn, and the engine won't spawn rocks where you can see them?

Take with a grain of salt...

Clarity...

This post has been edited by The Apple Cřre : 06 October 2005 - 10:03 PM

rmx, did you try giving a system a dozen or so roids and only checking the 'small' types? This is what I did and they simply wouldn't show up. I'd fly around for ages and never see a single one.
My first res higher than 1024x768 is 1280x800 (just slightly more area than 1152x870) and that's when I lose the small ones.