Year 12 - Day 357

I just returned from a 9 day trip out of state including a week in Disney World, so work on the game has been on hiatus for about two weeks.  Fortunately, a friend has started doing some play testing for me, so I'm getting a lot of feedback and finding some serious bugs that never would have shown up without multiple people playing at the same time.  The fact that someone is actually willing to spend some time playing the game is exciting to me also, since it means it's close to being a real game that people will be interested in playing.

My focus for the next few days will be to get colony pickup orders working, so I can transfer some material to the test accounts.  This will let me avoid having to create items directly in the database and transferring them over, which should save some time and also get important functionality up and running at the same time.

Then I'll get back to the combat program.  It's progressing nicely so far, and actual damage is being done to ships.  Ships aren't quite being destroyed yet, but that should be in soon.  I'm hoping to reach a point in the next week or so where I can let combat run past the hard 5 turn limit I have now and end programmatically instead.

Year 12 - Day 324 - Armor

Work is still progressing on the combat system.  Today I finalized some values for armor and ship speed calculation is now taking into account the armor a ship may have.  I'm borrowing the names of most of the armor types from one of my favorite 4X space games of all time.

Armor Types
1 = Durasteel  100 hps 2.5 weight per layer
2 = Tritanium 200 hps 2.0 weight per layer
3 = Zortrium  300 hps 1.5 weight per layer
4 = Neutronium 400 hps 1.0 weight per layer
5 = Adamantium 500 hps 0.5 weight per layer

The next big step in the combat code is having the damage actually being applied to ship modules, then I'll work on the consequences of that damage.

Year 12 - Day 313

I made more progress on the combat system today.  Actually, it involved a lot of code remediation and ripping out whole sections for a rewrite, but I've almost got the friend vs. foe functionality finished and soon there will be multiple ships involved in combat.

Year 12 - Day 312

Progress on the combat system is moving right along.  It's taken me so long to even get started on combat that it's really fun to see it start taking shape.  So far it's still just 1 ship vs. 1 ship, but they are maneuvering and firing Beam Lasers so far.   

Each turret gets to fire once a turn if the target is within range of the weapons installed in that turret.  Damage is being calculated based on the weapon's stats, but damage is not being applied to ships yet.

Here's a sample combat screenshot.  Click it to enlarge.

Year 12 - Day 293

I'm making some progress on both the market system and ship combat at this point.  I've been switching between them when one gets too frustrating.  Both are very complex and are going to require a lot of coding, testing, and debugging.

At first I thought I was just going to do 1 ship vs. 1 ship to get things started, but so far I've been putting in a lot of the code to handle multiple ships in a battle, so it looks like multiple ship combat will be available right from the start.

Year 12 - Day 276

I'm currently working on the Colony market screen.  By tomorrow a colony owner should be able to enter new market orders and have them show up on the list.

Year 12 - Day 193

I continued some work on the colony Market screen today.  I added the market orders table to the database and have orders displaying on the screen.  I found I designed myself into a slight corner, so I'm going to have to rework a little bit of stuff around items, but it's nothing major.  I'm thinking by the end of the weekend most of the buy/sell functionality should be finished off.

Ship Upgrades

I finished off almost all of the Ship Upgrade functionality today.  When ships upgrade, they use the correct amount of Starship Structural Units that must be in the cargo hold of the ship that's being upgraded.  I changed this just to make my life easier on the code, plus it frees up warehouse space in your colony.

The only thing that's missing is the ability for ships belonging to another player to use your shipyard via Upgrade Authorizations.  To do this I need to create the Shipyard screen, but I got distracted by stubbing out the Market screen as well.

With Upgrade Authorizations, you'll be able to allow another player to use your shipyard to upgrade to a certain level at a certain price.  You'll also be able to make it an Open shipyard that anyone can use at a certain price.  Along with the maximum level, you'll also be able to set a limit on the number of times a player can use it.

The Friend or Foe lists will also come into play here with options to allow ships on your Defend/Support lists to upgrade and of course to prohibit ships on your Enemy list from using the shipyard.

Year 12 - Day 191

So obviously I shouldn't make game decisions late at night after starting at code too much.  Making the ship upgrades cost 100 Ship Structural Units per level meant a ridiculous amount of materials would be spent at higher levels just for the ability to add another module onto the ship.

So the way I've got it setup now is that it takes 10 SSUs to go to the next level, but if you're going up at new base level (i.e. 1.9 to 2.0) then it takes 30 SSUs.  This takes into account that the new base levels allow you to also add another Engine or Command module.

I'm going to do the same thing for how much time it takes to upgrade ships also.  There will be a built in 1 hour to take into account moving the ship in and out of the shipyard, then it will take about an hour for an upgrade that doesn't increase the base level, and three hours for one that does.

So going from 0.1 to 0.2 will take about two hours.  Going from 0.9 to 1.0 will take about four hours.  There will likely be skills for personnel at a colony that can modify this down a bit, so a colony that is more experienced at upgrading can get you in and out faster.  I may also have it so a colony can specialize in Building or Upgrading so that you're faster doing one over the other.

Year 12 - Day 188

I took a break for the last week or so due to the holidays and a small amount of coding burnout, but I got back into it tonight.

First up I was trying to kill a bug where all the new ships I was creating was starting with Morale set to 0, when it should have been 10.  At first I thought it was a problem with my SQL insert, but I checked everything and an almost duplicate default value for Ship Class was working fine, so I tried not using the default value on the insert and it still came up 0.  After over an hour, I finally started thinking "oh, it must be a bug with MySQL", which is almost always NOT the case, but after a while you start getting desperate for answers.  I finally figured out it was because I wasn't initializing the time for when morale was last checked for the new ship, so the game though morale for the new ship hadn't been checked since Jan 1, 1970, which caused it to go to zero instantly.  Bleh.

After that I started giving some love to the Shipyard functionality when a ship is landed at a colony.  I've got it cleaned up a good bit, and now I just need to make it use resources, which will likely be Starship Structural Units.  Initially I'm going to set it to New Ship Class * 100 Structural Units, so to go from 0.1 to 0.2 it will take 20 units.  These units will either have to be in the ship's cargo hold, or in the colonies warehouse if your ship is at a colony you own.  I'll post a screenshot soon.

Year 12 - Day 175

I'm still working on the manufacturing system, and I also got side-tracked with a UI design overhaul.  UI design is extremely painful for me since I don't think I have a very good feel for what's attractive or what colors go with what.  Eventually I'll have to hire someone that is artistic to completely redo it, but for now I think it's better than it was.  See the screenshot below.

I've also started working on Mining, and the first deposit has been created in the database.  Next I'll have the colony that is on top of the mine extracting minerals from it, and then I'll work on the GM tools to place new deposits.

Year 12 - Day 169

So after what was pretty much a lost weekend due to Dreamhost screwing up the servers all weekend long I was able to finish off most of the Manufacturing functionality today.  I've still got to make it actually use up materials and do some more polishing, but right now I can pick an item from a list and have the colony start working on it.

So far I've worked it that you will build Factory Modules at your colony.  The module can have a number of build queues equal to it's integer level.  So a 1.2 module can have one queue, and a 2.7 module can have two.  Once you start building, any needed materials are moved into "Reserve" status, so they still take up space in the Warehouse, but can't be used for anything else.

If you choose to build 200 Structural Units, then it will build each one individually until they're all completed.  Partial builds will be available as soon as they're completed, so if you start building 200, then about five minutes later you'll have 1 new Structural Unit in your warehouse, and 199 left to build.

I've also nailed down the item hierarchy.  It will consist of four levels:

I : Raw Materials (example: Base Metals Ore)
II : Processed Materials (example: Processed Base Metals)
III:  Manufactured Components (example: Electronics, Structural Units)
IV: Manufactured Items (example: Jump Drive, Laser Cannon I)

Each level will be composed of 1 to 3 different types from lower levels.  So Processed Base Metals will take 2 Base Metals Ore.  There will likely be Technology that will lower this ratio.  Structural Units may take 1 Processed Base Metal and 1 Refined Hydrocarbons.

Here's a screenshot of some build queues in action.

Accurate Javascript Timers

While working on manufacturing today, I finally became fed-up with the fact that my javacript countdown timers in the game weren't very accurate.  I did some Google research and experimented on my own and finally came  up with a satisfactory solution for the timers to stay pretty accurate.

I did it by sending the desired end time derived from the PHP time() function as a variable to the javascript function, then using the Date().time() javascript function for the script to derive how many seconds it has left.  So a timer should never be more than a second out of sync now, but it does rely on the user having their system time set accurately.  This doesn't really matter since the game only shows the timers to the player as a convenience and doesn't actually use them to do any changes to the database.

It's Alive!

Earlier today, the colony Fort Jackson in the Marvin(1) system finished the first manufactured items in Project Libertine:  It created 26 units of Processed Metals Ore.

Of course, I had to manually enter the build order into the database, but it is currently chugging away on that build queue, creating a new unit every 600 seconds.  It's also not using raw materials yet, but that's just nitpicking, right?

I'm hoping to have the manufacturing code wrapped up by the end of the week, and then dive right into writing the Mining code, which should involve a lot of copying and pasting of code, so hopefully it will go faster.

I also created the first 1000 Human Colonists today, but they're not doing anything as of yet.  Eventually they will provide man-hours needed by the factories and mines.

Manufacturing Started

As I thought I might, I decided to start working on manufacturing today.  I made some good progress, but you can't build anything yet.  Colonies will be able to build Manufacturing Modules, which are rated from 0.1 to 10.0.  The levels from 0.1 to 0.9 are considered Under Construction and the modules are not active.  At 1.0, you gain the ability to use your first Build Queue to construct items.  So you can add a queue to process 500 units of raw ore, or have it start building 10 Jump Modules.  At 2.0 you get another queue, etc.

I got the queue table designed in the database.  At first I went one direction where each module would have permanent queues that hold build instructions, but I decided to go a different direction where you just add queues as you need them and they disappear after they're finished.

My current target is to have the first item manufactured by the end of this week, so stay tuned for news and screenshots.

Friend or Foe Wrapup

I finished off the Friend or Foe functionality today and killed a few other bugs I found.  Each list is now limited to 10 entries, and I added error messages to let the user know why a ship didn't get added.  When the game eventually goes live, one of the perks for being a paying "Member" of the game is that the size of the Friend or Foe lists will be bigger.  I haven't even started adding any of that to the game yet, though.

To test the lists, I had to create a bunch of new ships.  None of them are armed, and to arm them I'd have to create a bunch of weapons by hand in the database.  So I think this might be a good point to veer off for a bit and work on the manufacturing part of the game for colonies.  I'll decide when I sit down at the computer tomorrow afternoon and fire up the editor.

Friend or Foe?

As part of my current effort to actually have ships shooting at each other in the near future, I've been working on getting the Friend or Foe lists completed on the Ship Combat Programming page.

Basically, how it works is that each asset you own (ship, colony, or expeditionary force) has a Combat Programming page.  At the bottom of this page are three lists: Support, Defend, and Enemy.

If you're in the same location as an asset on your Support List, you'll join in on their side if they attack someone else.

If you're in the same location as an asset on your Defend List, you'll join in on their side if they are attacked.

The Enemy list will not let you automatically attack someone, since I'm going to require you to actually click a button to attack someone.  However, it will be useful in giving you more visual indicators that there's a possibly hostile ship in the same location as you, and will probably give you a small advantage if you're attacked by someone on your Enemy list.  I haven't worked all of that out yet.

Unarmed ships don't have a Combat Program, other than attempting to flee on round #1 or maybe an option to surrender immediately.  I'm still working out the details on that part as well.  You don't have to put your own ships on the lists, since an armed ship will automatically Support/Defend other ships belonging to the same player and/or faction.

Here's a screenshot of a current Combat Program page showing the Friend or Foe lists.  The top part of the page is still under construction.

Back

I spent last week on the beach near Gulf Shores, Alabama, and I was almost completely offline, so no work on the game happened, although I did come up with a few new things while I was relaxing on the beach.

Today I did some small polishing work on stuff like the Reports page to keep one part of my mind occupied while I mull over how to do a few things.  I started goofing around with the ship combat code a little and made a little progress there.  I can tell already that to get the combat the way I want it is going to be a huge pain in the ass, but it should be worth it.

I think I mentioned it before, but I decided to go ahead and write the combat code to include multiple ships per side.  I was going to do 1 vs. 1 to get started, but I think that to rewrite it afterwards would be almost as bad as coding it up in the first place.  So to do that, I'll have to code up more on the Ship Combat Programming, but that's a good thing.

Hopefully soon I can post a few initial combat reports.  Right now they're mostly just debugging statements.

More Weapons Work

I'm still working on the Ship Weapons page.  I've got it so you can install weapons from cargo into available turrets, and now I'm doing some work on items in general to actually require time to elapse while items are being transferred from cargo into a turret or back to cargo.  This will also let me finish up the cargo transfers and means a lot of the work will already be done once I start coding up the Market buys and sells.  Some of the same code will also be used once I start working on Manufacturing, so this is all significant progress that I'm making.

Weapon Systems Coming Online

I created the first weapons in the game yesterday, which were a few Beam Lasers.  Sometime later today they should be installed on a starship for the first time.

I was going to just develop the starship combat first for 1 vs. 1, but I've decided to go ahead and have it account for other ships joining in since it would involve a lot of rework later on.  This means I'll have to do a little more pre-work before I get started on the combat, but should be much more satisfying when it's done.

All combat will begin by one ship clicking Attack on another ships, but then friend vs. foe lists will be checked for any other ships/colonies at that location so if you have the defending ship on your Defend list, you will join in on their side.  Conversely, if you have the attacking ship on your Support list, you'll join that side.

Space Sluts? I has them...

Things are moving along nicely in the game recently.  I added functionality to place turrets on ships recently.  A ship has to be at least class 1.0 to have a hardpoint, and turrets can be placed on the hardpoints.  There will be different kinds of turrets, like Beam Weapon and Missile.  There will also be larger weapon systems that will require multiple hardpoints.  So a fighter bay may take 3 hardpoints, while a spinal mount may take five.

A ship will have one hardpoint for each full class it is.  So a 2.0 will have two hardpoints.  A 3.5 will have three, etc.

All of this is slowly leading up to me being able to get the combat system going.  I've also been working on the login page, and have commissioned some artwork from Evolluisionist on deviantART.  You can see the preliminary artwork and the recent redesign on the login page at www.projectlibertine.com.

Updated Resumes?

One of the things I want to emphasize in the game is character development for the ship crews.  In order to do this I've started implementing personnel "events" in the game.  This will allow you to see a list of important events that have occurred to that character during play.  It will track things like being hired, fired, participating in a battle, discovering a new star system, etc.  This will also allow me to implement a sort of badge system, so characters can earn medals like battle stars for combat or a ribbon for making your 100th jump.  I plan to do something similar for ships as well.

Side Tracks

I got bored with all the graphics stuff, so for the last day or so I've been wandering off doing some other things.  I fixed some bugs and I added the ability for a user to change their language.  Right now the only options are English and German, and only a few labels are changed to German, but I thought I might as well do some of it as I go along so it won't be a huge chore somewhere down the road.  I'm not sure what other languages I'll translate it to, but I would imagine French and Italian may be forthcoming.  I'd love to translate it to Chinese, but it's such a different language than what I'm used to that the task is daunting to me.  At least with German I can almost follow along.

I also took another look at ship combat, but this made me realize that I'm really not ready to start writing the combat code since I haven't even added weapons to the game and don't have the ability for players to set some basic tactics for their ships.  Eventually you'll be able to tell your ship what distance it should try to maintain to the target, or what round to flee on if you want to stay and fight for a few rounds then try to escape.  I've got the framework or the Ship Combat Orders up, and once I create a few lasers I can start making the combat more complex.  The combat system is probably the one part of the game that is going to require the most work, even from deciding exactly how it's going to work.

Automatic Stars

So I was out of town attending the SERA Cave Carnival in Alabama most of the weekend, but tonight I worked on the star system editor and got it to the point where the majority of star graphics are added automatically when you create a new star.  This is a big improvement for me since I was previously forced to manually edit the database to add stars that take up more than one space square like B, A, F, and G types.

O type stars and Red Giants are not part of the random star generation code, so I'll still have to specify those but should have the system adding the graphics automatically soon.

Here's a screen shot of an A type star I created in a new star system tonight.

Login Page Redesign

I got tired of seeing my boring login page, so I spent a few hours tonight redesigning it.  I like it so far, but I need to buy some scifi artwork to make it look a little better.

I also enterer several hundred more planet tiles into the DB today, and I've got about 200 more to do plus whatever tiles Jake sends me in his next update, but I'm definitely close.  That will just leave the asteroid tiles, but those should go a lot faster.

Spaghetti Anyone?

Blarg.  I started looking into the code I've written over the last few years to display my star systems and it's just plain nasty.  I'm such a hack when it comes to coding.  Heh.  I've started ripping it all out and I'm replacing almost all of it.  At least it's more fun to work on this than to enter more db rows about planet tiles.

I have made a few decisions about how I'm going to use the Morale rating on ships and colonies.  It will act more like an efficiency rating for the most part.  So it will start at 100% and will affect things like how much He3 you scoop at gas giants, or anything else where an efficient, happy crew would be able to do things more effectively.  If morale reaches 0, the ship will mutiny and disappear.  This is how I'll handle accounts that stop playing.  The ships will disappear, but the crew will eventually show up at a colony and can be hired by another player.

The main way to raise morale will be to grant shore leave at a colony.  This is another way to make sure ships have to come back in from the wild every once and a while.  When you grant shore leave, you also have to spend money for the crew salaries, and part of that money will go back to the colony owner.  There will be a type of Entertainment complex that can be constructed at colonies, and the better that complex is the more Morale will be raised for a ship and the colony owner will collect more of the income.

Graphics Update

Things are still moving along slowly on the graphics rewrite.  I've entered over 2000 image tiles into the database and still have about 500 to go.  I've also ordered a new set of supplemental tiles from my artist Jake and will have to enter those as well.  That leaves the entire asteroid field tile set to enter.

I also got Jake to create brand new star system object images, and they look spectacular.  He went above and beyond the call as usual and I'm looking forward to showing off some new star system images very soon.

Code wise, I'm updating the tools to create star systems and planets still, but they're getting better every week.  I can create a basic star system in about 10 minutes, which is a lot faster than it used to be.  Hopefully in a few more weeks I can wrap this up and move on to adding more stuff for players to do in the game.

Graphics Update

I've been working hard getting tiles entered into the database.  I'm currently about 31% finished with this task if I include all of the asteroid tiles.

Jake the artist is hard at work as well, and has been teasing me with some of the new terran images for the star system map.  He's also going to be sending me several hundred new planet tiles, so they'll have to be entered in the database as well.

The planet editor is almost finished, and I've been creating a few more planets to try it out.  I still haven't decided on a maximum planet size yet.  I'm thinking of maybe 25x25 squares, which would give the largest planets 625 squares to explore.  I may go as high as 30x30, but probably not much more than that.

Final Course

I'm still moving right along on the planet terrain rewrite.  I've got all of the Terran planet squares entered and have made progress on most of the other planet types.  This should allow me to redo the asteroid code fairly quickly, since it's all very similar.

Unfortunately, while digging around in the code to allow me to create some of the planet types I never did in the past, I realized how old and clunky a few parts of the code to display star systems is.  This was some of the first code I wrote for the game and it's all completely hacked together with baling wire and superglue.  It won't be nearly as big of a project, but some refactoring will have to be done there as well.

I also woke up my main artist, who has apparently gone and created himself an Internet radio station featuring Goth Metal.  He's working on some supplemental planet tiles and is creating me a whole new set of system object tiles.

Chaos

Development went down into major chaos over the last few days as I replaced my PC with a Mac Mini   and switched my IDE over to NetBeans with Safari as my main test browser.  So far things are going pretty smooth, although the Firebug plugin seems a little wonky in Safari.

I've decided to not even attempt to make the game work with Internet Explorer.  I realize this may cut out part of my audience, but oh well.  I'm just so fucking tired of dealing with Windows.  I'm forced to do it at work, so I'm damn sure not going to expose myself to that crap at home when I don't have to.

So my major focus is now in getting the planet editor up to snuff.  I'm working on some web services and making the page nice and AJAXy.  I've got most of the Terran planet tiles entered in the DB now, and I've been working on making some new planets while I'm working on the planet editor.

Progress

I cleaned up some code on the Planet display screen tonight to use the new tile system and some small gui improvements.

I've also been slowly adding more tiles to the database.  I'm probably averaging about 100 a day, so in a month I may be finished.  Then I'll have to create default descriptions for each.  The fun never ends.  Heh.

Tusks and Toes

So I've finished off the majority of the code rewrite.  The game now correctly displays planet squares in the new system in all three screens that show them.  Now I just need to add a few more things to the planet editor and test it a bit.

I've still got thousands of image tiles to go through and get into the database, so that's still going to be a real chore.  I can just dribble those in for now though.

I also realized that I've got to do all of this again with the Asteroid Squares now.  Sigh.

Bite Three

More major progress tonight.  I deleted all of the planet square data and now have the planet editor displaying the planets tiles under the new system.  Below is a screenshot of an ice planet under construction.  Now I just need to make sure the rest of the places in the game that display planet surfaces get changed over and one of the major legs of this rewrite will be complete.

I still have a TON of database work to do to get all of the planet tile graphics into the system, but there is a slight hint of a light at the end of the tunnel.

Bite Two

I made more progress on the planet tile rewrite tonight, although I don't have much to show for it in the game.  Tonight I concentrated on learning how to use local browser storage and implementing it on the planet edit page.  Now when I load this page, the tile information gets stored locally in my browser so I can rapidly display different sets of tiles by changing dropdown values. I also had to brush up on my javascript skills since it's been a while since I've added and removed elements from the DOM that way.

This has no bearing on you as a player at all, but it will let me create planets faster and easier, so there will be more content for you to explore.

I did import some more tiles to the database also, but I've still got a LONG way to go on that.

First Bite

So tonight I finally started Eating the Elephant on the planet tile rework. In the last couple of days I had to figure out what exactly it was I wanted to do, since I didn't leave myself very good notes the last time I expended a lot of brain power on this. There are several phases for this that I'll be going through.

1. Create new tile db table and add all 3000+ image tiles to it.

     Actually, I haven't even finished uploading all of the graphics that my artist sent me in the first place. This is the part I'm dreading the most since I'm going to have to actually eyeball each tile and add the topology and terrain type for it's entry in the database.

 2. Rewrite the Edit tool.

      This won't be too bad since the point of this whole rewrite in the first place was to make this easier. This may be the first place I use some real HTML5 for the game since it's an Admin tool and I won't mind storing data in a local db.

3. Rewrite the planet and asteroid field display code.

     This shouldn't be too bad.  I'm saving this for last though.

 4. Wipe all planet/asteroid data and make new ones.

     I think there are only about 5 planets and moons in the game anyway that have any real design to them. Once I get this all together I'll be able to make a random planet generator, which should be a lot of fun to work on.

 So as of tonight I've done a small amount of Step 1 and a small amount of Step 2.  Hopefully I'll have some screenshots to show off by this weekend.

Cargo Work

I found a small defect in moving cargo between a ship and a colony tonight so while I was fixing that I got sucked into adding some more code around that. The user wasn't getting any message once a cargo move failed, so I added code to show errors. This should make it a lot less confusing.

Personnel

So as it turns out I'm avoiding the planetary display rewrite like the plague right now. I've been sick for the last three weeks so working on something that complex hasn't been very appealing anyway. So lately I've been working a bit on the code for personnel. I've added calculations to show how much an employee will be paid each month. I total up the value of their skills across the 15 current skills I have in the game and multiply that by 100 to determine salary. Soon you'll be able to fire employees as long as they are at a colony, and they'll go onto the available personnel list so other players can hire them. In the very long term I'd like to have employees that find themselves at an outlying colony start to move in towards the core systems if they aren't hired after a certain amount of time.

Current Skill List

Engineering
Biology
Gunnery
Astrogation
Chemistry
Physics
Geology
Medical
Tactics
Piloting
Command
Management
Sensors
Cargo
Mining