When I use the mining beam, I can fire it at any surface of the roid. Okay. But when I point at another part of the roid, the beam remains anchored where I first shot it. It will remain anchored there even if I go around to the other side of the roid. Also note that there's for some reason a FPS slowdown when the beam is going through the roid. Perhaps this is a good time to introduce vertex occlusion culling? :D Anyhow, the beam shouldn't be anchored like that.

Second bug of the same type is the from 1st person the beam appears to spawn from the center of the screen. This is visually unappealing and should be changed to be the same point as weaposn launch from.

--Roguelazer

On top of that, if you orient your ship down in relationship to the beam, if the beams originate from the bottom of the ship, then they appear to go through your ship. For example, the Centaur's large weapon ports are on the bottom of the ship, so if you point down, they go through the top.

It would take a bit more code, but line-of-sight-limited mining beams would be nice to fix the graphical (and logical) problems Pidgeon pointed out.. So if you point in the wrong direction, the beam quits, just as if you drifted too far away. If pretty much anything gets in the way of your beam, it quits.

This would allow annoying people to disrupt your mining though. That would get old fast.

the mining beam goes down roughly to the closest point on the asteroid. if you want it to hit another part of the asteroid move your ship.

i actually dont care too much about the graphics of mining. they are a little cheesy but the fun of exploring/mining far outweighs this issue.

Mining rotating roids sometimes results in the beams connecting with an empty point in space until the roid comes back around. I agree with ananzi that the ability to mine and explore is huge in comparison. I'm glad that we have it sooner with a few minor issues rather than later all polished up.

also, with spinny roids the "dust" graphic where your beam meets the roid is sometimes far away from where the beam actualy hits the roid, just a minor graphical bug i thought id throw out.