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