The Big Dig

Well, I seem to have convinced myself that my next big project on the game is to finally rework the code that generates planet displays. This is going to involve moving more information into the database and reworking the engine that displays planetary surfaces. I'll probably be working on this for at least a week, if not more. This will make it much easier for me to eventually create a random planet generator, and since I'm going to need hundreds of planets eventually, I'll need to generate them randomly first then modify them. The new system should also allow more flexibility so I can put mineral resources and anomalies and other nifty stuff for players to find when they're down on the surface. Usually when I start working on this much code it leads me in another interesting direction also, so I may even dream up a new feature or two.

Gas Giant Scooping Redux

I'm not sure what I was talking about last night when I said I had finished up Gas Scooping. I guess it was late and I was tired, because I've worked on it today for about 4 hours and I'm still not completely done with it. It is much closer to being complete, however. I've also killed several bugs in the code today and converted several more pages over to HTML5. I also spent some time cleaning up the interface and I think it looks much better than it did. Here's a shot of a ship in orbit of a gas giant.

Gas Giant Scooping

For the past week or so I've been going through the game and fixing small problems, refactoring some code, and starting the process of getting everything moved over to the HTML5 standard, even though I'm not really doing anything that needs HTML5. Yet.

Tonight I finally jumped in and started doing some meatier coding, and I've finished up the ship action of Gas Giant Scooping by having a check performed so that before you can scoop you have to have an crew member on board with the Mining skill and that crew member must be assigned to the Specialist position on the ship.

I think my focus for now is going to be getting as much of the ship actions as possible coded out that don't involve interaction with colonies and combat. This is a blatant attempt to avoid working on the combat code since I'm still not exactly sure how I want combat to work.

HTML 5

I'm working on it, I swear! I've been doing some experimentation with switching things over to HTML5 and so far it's going pretty good other than a few odd quirks:

HMTML5 Quirk