Yesterday I spent some time coming up with the component that populates planets with rocks.\u00a0 Not elements, mind you… that’s next.\u00a0 These are just plain old ordinary rocks that you don’t mine.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Because if the planet was populated with just elements, it’d look really weird.\u00a0 So having a blend of ordinary rocks dotting the terrain along with elements you can mine should make things look and feel more natural.<\/p>\n

Also, the number of rocks present on a planet is proportional to the mineral density reported by the ship scanner.\u00a0 And, they will generally be placed in the higher elevations.<\/p>\n

I have made it so that you collide with the rocks instead of driving through them.\u00a0 Having the TV drive through 3D objects in the game would just look broken and wrong.\u00a0 The collision behavior works nicely for the most part but will need some fine tuning later to clean up the extreme angle cases.<\/p>\n

I have discovered another weakness in Unity.\u00a0 Unity takes 4 whole seconds to instantiate the 2500 rocks I am placing on the planet.\u00a0 And that is on my bleeding edge 10 core Alienware PC!\u00a0 That is a ridiculous amount of time.\u00a0 So, real-time\u00a0instantiation is a major performance issue with Unity and I’m going to have to try and think of alternative solutions.<\/p>\n

Here is a video showing a nice cruise through the terrain finding and bumping into ordinary non-mineable rocks.<\/p>\n<\/div>