Found my solution.
Since I have a source dust sprite that I make copies from, While intitializing the environment I move the source dust sprite to the point 900 units ahead of the ship and then make the ship a parent to the dust sprite so it moves and rotates with it. Then I calculate the new dust positions based on the source dust's global coordinates.
I'm note sure at this point which is more processor optimized.
a: Having an entity constantly being updated in memory as a child to the ship.
or
b: Calculationg a new position based on the current ship coordinates as needed.
Seems like option B would be a better use of memory and processor time but then that has to do with how often a dust is moved.
I would like to find a function that will return the global position of the ship 900 untis ahead without actually using the processor time consumed by moving the ship, getting the coordinates, and then moving the ship back to it's original location.
Since I have a source dust sprite that I make copies from, While intitializing the environment I move the source dust sprite to the point 900 units ahead of the ship and then make the ship a parent to the dust sprite so it moves and rotates with it. Then I calculate the new dust positions based on the source dust's global coordinates.
I'm note sure at this point which is more processor optimized.
a: Having an entity constantly being updated in memory as a child to the ship.
or
b: Calculationg a new position based on the current ship coordinates as needed.
Seems like option B would be a better use of memory and processor time but then that has to do with how often a dust is moved.
I would like to find a function that will return the global position of the ship 900 untis ahead without actually using the processor time consumed by moving the ship, getting the coordinates, and then moving the ship back to it's original location.