I've noticed that if you mine a rotating roid, the mining beam sometimes appears to be hitting empty space. In fact, I haven't quite figured out how the game decides where the mining beam should hit..

Perhaps having the beam just going to the centroid of the roid would be fine... except for donut shaped roids.

I've also noticed that there are some roids out there whose appearance has no bearing on what it yields. I found an ice crystal roid last night that was 100% silicate ore I think.

I would presume that roids appearances should be dictated by the most common ore in them. Would be neat (and probably a pain in the keister) to have roid models that were 'hybrids' of the ore types. Like a rock with some ice crystals on one side of it.

Ya this is tricky. Targetting on the center of roids would be hard with large or rotating roids. I guess they could extend the range of the beams to accomodate this.

I suppose you could render the beam to the center of the roid and just clip it at the surface. An alternative would be to have the beam target the nearest surface polygon on the model and then update that like once a second or so.

As it is now it looks like the beam latches onto a random vertex of the model.

The beam latches onto the nearest point of the asteroid when you activate the mining beam. The point doesn't change, so that is why it looks like the endpoint is in space sometimes.

The look of the asteroid is supposed to show what it has but there is a random variation that could cause the base mineral to not be there. Heh, you can think of the crystal as being a glass crystal made of sand or other silicates.

So it would be as easy as updating the nearest point once in a while...

yeah

Of course, every update means more data to go out to everybody in the sector...

Quite a few a second if you don't want the beam to appear to be jumping around. On the other hand, a beam is just a beginning and end point. How much lag can two points cause?

I bet the load would be negligible compared to firing a high rate gun, so I doubt it would cause any problems.

Nah, I would have the effect done client-side so it will be exact. And since it is only a special effect, there's no problem with have it done client-side.

You might want to consider having it target the centroid of the nearest polygon instead of the nearest vertex. It seems a little wierd when you are mining an ice crystal and the beam is hitting the point of one end.....

The beam should do neither nearest nor center, but the point at which your reticle is aimed.

No, I don't do nearest vertex, I do actual nearest exact point.
rogue: perhaps, but then turning away would stop the mining process. I suppose that may be desirable.

No, I mean have it establish the "lock" with where you're pointing, then keep it like it is so that it stays connected between there and the beam point on your ship, no matter where you point.